We all want our food to be handled safely and cleanly, and common-sense safety regulations are good for everyone. Our local food safety inspectors do an important job. But the agribusiness lobby and major slaughterhouses that kill thousands of animals a day have piled up onerous paperwork, tortuous red tape, and “bean counting” regulations to artificially limit competition from smaller, niche meat processors. We all know that the major slaughterhouse corporations sometimes abuse and frequently underpay their workers, cut corners on quality and safety, have been accused, in court, of price-fixing and other anti-consumer behavior, and at most end up paying less in fines than they pay their attorneys. Meanwhile, small Mom and Pop meat processors who do everything the right way and have a better safety record still struggle to make sense of paperwork and convoluted rules that arguably don’t improve safety and don’t make any sense for small scale processors. Here in Western Oregon, there is a severe shortage of small scale meat processing; nevertheless, we’re far better off here than in many other states. All of our meats from Anchor Ranch Farm are processed humanely and safely by local, usually family-owned and -operated, meat processors and butchers. We’re more than happy to support local, small scale meat processors with our business. We don’t have facilities on farm to process animals safely and humanely, and while it’s nice to dream about being able to do so one day, at our present scale it would be prohibitively expensive. (It would require several million dollars.)
Some of the local, independent meat processors we use are:
Crystal Creek Meats (in Roseburg)
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Mobile Processing
Mobile processing is when a meat processor comes to the farm to humanely harvest and slaughter the animal. Normally the carcass is then transported, in a freezer truck, to a regular meat processor / butcher shop. We think mobile processing is the best way to humanely harvest livestock, because the animals don’t have to be transported in a trailer and are harvested in familiar surroundings where they are safe and secure.
However, because the short supply of independent local processing means we have to schedule our processing dates up to a year (sometimes more!) in advance, this is really only logistically possible for us if we plan to take animals to the processor on a specific day. If you want mobile processing for your animal, you are welcome to try to set it up and we will be happy to work with you and your processor, but that would be up to you to work out. Be advised that we don’t know any mobile processors who can afford to come out to our farm just to harvest a single animal, which is one part of a larger problem. Your favorite local butcher also probably won’t accept meat from a mobile processor they don’t know.