Salt Spring Abattoir to Open For Business This Spring

A few years ago the government changed the Meat Regulations to require inspection of all facilities slaughtering meat in the province. The upgrades required were costly for many operators, so all around the province, and in the Gulf Islands, local abattoirs shut down. Animals needed to be transported off-island, since most Gulf Islands did not have licenced facilities. The off-island abattoirs available were often over-booked, creating bottle-necks or long waits. Based on surveys in 2004 and 2010, it became apparent that there was a significant decline in meat production on Salt Spring Island. The newly formed Salt Spring Agricultural Alliance prioritized the building of a Salt Spring abattoir, and decided on a mobile processing unit with an accessory modular cut and wrap facility. With a twelve person committee, the Alliance worked hard at fund raising to “Save Salt Spring Lamb”, one of the region’s most famous foods.

Is it on budget? Yes, with the help of donations, price discounts and recycled materials, the plans are becoming reality. At a price of $350,000, the fund raising efforts have been very successful and is very, very close to its goal.. The government is providing $150,000 in matching funds, and about $200,000 has been raised so far. The Salt Spring Agricultural Alliance was awarded $50,000 from VanCity’s enviroFund to increase local food production on Salt Spring Island. This helped push the project ahead in hiring a construction manager.

Is it on time? No, it was hoped that it would be up and running in the fall of 2011. A nine month delay was experienced waiting for the plans to be approved by the BC Centre for Disease Control. There were many changes required to the plans but they are now approved.

What is done so far? The selected location has industrial zoning, is flat and well drained and has good road access. The property owner is also a farmer , which will make his farm’s transportation to the plant just a walk across the field. The Islands Trust gave the project a Temporary Use Permit, which is good for three years and can be renewed once. At that point, the abattoir location will be reassessed. The Trust also required a riparian assessment to be done because of a pond and some drainage areas in the vicinity.

A new ecoflow peat filtered septic field was installed by Ken Byron. There is a travel trailer for a site office, lunch room and change area for abattoir staff. Three modular structures were framed in when I was given a tour by Margaret Thomson and Mike Robertson– the offal room for the guts, the cooler, the cut and wrap room which will also hold a freezer, along with the washroom and office for the inspector. The crew was working on the hide room when I was there. The CRD building department required each of the modules, which can be moved, to be ten feet apart so walkways are being built to connect the modules. The drawings have been prepared by Brent Baker, who is the construction manager. Brent is a principal partner in Shibui Design, and has been involved in cost effective planning and construction for over thirty years. Brent is also the son in law of Mike Byron, long time Salt Spring farmer who was one of the islanders who processed livestock for the community before the regulations changed.

Although the modules for the abattoir are being constructed on Salt Spring with local labour, the trailer unit which will be used for slaughtering of both red meat and poultry is being made in Coombs. Once the abattoir has its licence, hopefully in April, there will be two test slaughter days – one for red meat, and one for poultry.

The one detail left is to select staff to run the abattoir. The SSI Agricultural Alliance is now looking for “expressions of interest and creative proposals from individuals, groups or other entities who are interested in running ongoing operations of the abattoir as well as anyone interested in being part of the operations team for this exciting new local food venture.” They are anxious to receive proposals by March 15^th so that they can be up and running this spring. To submit a proposal, contact Anne Macey annemacey@shaw.ca or mail to SSI Agricultural Alliance, 106 Old Scott Road, SSI V8K 2L6.

But if you build it, will they come? Already, based on a survey of poultry producers, there is greater demand than anticipated originally. Many red meat producers have been expanding their herds and flocks. Consumers, chefs and retail outlets have shown great interest in receiving a dependable supply of fresh local meat, truly in the hundred mile diet way.

Want To Open A Slaughterhouse? Go To Meat School : NPR

Want To Open A Slaughterhouse? Go To Meat School : NPR

Want To Open A Slaughterhouse? Go To Meat School

by David Sommerstein

Listen to the Story on the link above

August 3, 2010

Remember Sam the Butcher from The Brady Bunch?
Today, the days of the neighborhood butcher like Sam are mostly gone, replaced by vast meat-processing plants putting out shrink-wrapped cuts for supermarkets.
But foodies and locavores are fueling a demand for local and artisanal meat products. The problem is there aren't enough slaughterhouses or qualified meat cutters.
A Month In The Meat Lab: $3,000
It was lamb day recently at the State University of New York's meat lab in Cobleskill, a little town near Albany. Guys in white smocks and hard hats haul carcasses out of the cooler. They slaughtered the animals the day before.

Enlarge David Sommerstein/NPR McKeever Stanley was looking for a job when he enrolled in the State University of New York's Meat Lab course. He says he loves to dress the venison he hunts each fall.

Instructor Clint Lane runs through the cut list.
"All the riblets, we're gonna pull the flank off of them, cut 'em in half for riblets," he says. "Shanks — we'll do half of 'em as whole and half of 'em as cross-cuts."
The students slice the carcasses on the band saw. They forked over $3,000 for a month of killing, cutting, and grinding up beef, pork and lamb. They get a meat-processing and food-safety certificate and the basic know-how to work in the industry.
Fred Beckman, who's worked in Manhattan's fanciest restaurants, wants to sell his own foie gras, terrines and sausages.
"There's nothing that's more satisfying than biting into something that has a great deal of good fat," he says.
McKeever Stanley, who's out of a job, loves to dress the venison he hunts every fall.
"My wife one day said, 'Why don't you go to school and do it and get paid for it?'"
And Tom Acampora, a construction worker, wants to build a slaughterhouse next to his home.
"Walk out in the morning with a cup of coffee, start doing some cleanup and get going at my own leisure," he says.
Shortage Of Small Slaughterhouses
The local food movement is driving more farmers to raise animals for meat. But between farm and table is a bottleneck — a shortage of small slaughterhouses serving small farms, especially in the Northeast.

You've gotta know which end to start cutting and then just start cutting, whether it's on a saw or with a knife. The skill of knowing where that part came off — and how to get it from a carcass — has left.

- Meat Lab Director Eric Shelley

"What we need is for that smaller operator who may have 100 acres or 150 acres — he would like to have the opportunity to take and raise a few cattle or a few hogs and be able to slaughter them and sell them locally. To do that, you have to have an infrastructure," says Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.
There are a couple reasons for the shortage. Hundreds of slaughterhouses went out of business in the 1990s after new, technical regulations took effect. Betsy Hodge, of Cornell Cooperative Extension, says they make what's known as an abattoir costly to build and daunting to run.
"They're put in there for safety reasons. But they are sort of overwhelming for these smaller slaughterhouse operators to handle," she says.
Also, the craft of butchery is becoming scarce. It used to be that aspiring knifemen apprenticed with a butcher, or in the meat department of the neighborhood grocer.
Help Meat Stay Local
But meat cutting has industrialized. Plants in the Midwest slaughter and cut up tens of thousands of animals each day.
At the meat lab, director Eric Shelley teaches his students about every step, from food safety and humane animal handling to how to cook different cuts.

Enlarge David Sommerstein/NPR Meat Lab director Eric Shelley wants to revive the fading craft of meat-cutting.

He drills a student on the lamb's basic parts, or primals.
Shelley used to work at Walmart, where, like most supermarkets today, meat arrives pre-cut into the primals.
"Basically, it comes out of a box," he says. "You've gotta know which end to start cutting and then just start cutting, whether it's on a saw or with a knife. The skill of knowing where that part came off — and how to get it from a carcass — has left."
Jason Cramer wraps and labels shank cuts, the final product. He wants to start a slaughterhouse on the farm where he works near Buffalo, N.Y. They run a herd of 300 Hereford cattle. But they have to truck them to Pennsylvania for butchery.
"It's just a shame to see it go out of state and to go into these big factories and get mixed in with all this other meat when, in my eyes, it should be sold locally because we put so much time and effort into the animals," he says.
The federal government is taking small steps to help meat stay local. The USDA is offering grants for mobile slaughterhouses, an abattoir on wheels that goes from farm to farm.
Meat lab director Eric Shelley says more than half of his graduates work in the industry today — they're starting to fill in the gap left by the disappearance of Sam the Butcher.

Sheep Field Day on Saturna Island

Field day participants enjoying view at Taylor Point, Saturna

On Saturday, July 24th the Inter Island Sheep Breeders had a terrific sheep field day at Campbell Farm on Saturna Island. The field day was open to anyone who wanted to know more about sheep in the Gulf Islands, historically famous for its lamb and the Saturna Island Canada Day Lamb Barbeque. The Campbell family were wonderful hosts, greeting us with coffee and home baked goodies after 20 producers and visitors arrived by water taxi and ferry. It was great to see NDP Agriculture critic Lana Popham there, and Eric and Sue Boulton from Gabriola - and a boat full of Salt Spring farmers. Others came from Vancouver Island, Pender Island, Mayne Island, and Saturna Island.

Anita O'Brien showing Psion RFID tag reader

Anita O'Brien, a sheep specialist and traceability expert from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture working with the Canadian Sheep Federation (CSF), described the CSF national radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag trial that the Campbell Farm is part of, and she demonstrated the specialized equipment and software used to read the tags and store data on each animal. Jacques Campbell is testing two or three electronic tag types, a Psion tag reader, a bluetooth enabled scale head, and Farmworks software. This was a good opportunity to see the potential (and problems) with RFID tags, which are to be mandatory in Canada by Dec 31, 2012. The current mandatory system uses an inexpensive “pink” tag that must be manually read and recorded and must be on every animal that leaves the home farm. The federal government will go to mandatory traceability by December 31, 2011 and the Canadian Sheep Federation is keeping pace with this timeline by phasing out the current non-RFID tags and going to mandatory RFID tags. Traceability is often emphasized as something needed to improve food safety, but it's real value is as a system designed to shorten the time to trace livestock in the event of a foreign animal disease outbreak, such as foot and mouth disease. This would greatly reduce the amount of animals needlessly destroyed in a disease outbreak. However, this has not been without controversy since the RFID tags are more expensive, and the equipment is extremely expensive, so the purpose of this national trial, and a recently completed study in Alberta, is to determine management benefits to the RFID tags and equipment, and to determine how useful the tags and equipment are in field conditions. Other questions that producers have about “full traceability” have to do with the tracking of individual animals that must be done by producers who are moving animals beyond a 10 km radius from the home farm. If producers can't afford the RFID readers, they will still have to manually read and record each tag and record animal movements.

Campbell Farm Abattoir - Class A facility license

The second part of the field day was a demonstration of lamb processing in the Campbell's facility. Campbell Farm Abattoir is a small building with a walk in cooler, a cut and wrap area, and a processing floor that is lower to give greater height in processing beef. A newer building close by contains the inspector's office and washroom, the walk-in freezer, a workshop, office, and guest space with a good sized meeting room where we had a productive lunch time discussion after the demonstrations. The Campbell's operate one day per week during most of the summer, fall and into the winter. They use a cooperative model where people in the community help out, and they process up to 3 beef or 15 lambs per day. In one season they usually process 9 beef and 120 lambs, both for themselves and for the community. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) inspector arrives by ferry at 6:30 am, and is done and on the 10:30 am ferry on Fridays. An inspector came out on a Saturday just for this field day. The plant was upgraded so that it could be licensed as a class A plant capable of both slaughtering and cutting and wrapping meat, thus meeting requirements for the meat regulations which now require meat for sale in the southern Gulf Islands to be government inspected. This was critical for the annual Saturna Island Canada Day Lamb Barbeque, a long time fundraiser for the community of Saturna Island. Having a licensed plant has allowed producers to sell to grocery stores, restaurants and to keep their regular customers. Communities lacking inspected facilities have experienced large declines in livestock numbers.
Some participants had never witnessed a lamb being slaughtered, and commented on how humane and quiet it was, very efficient and respectful to the animals. It is reassuring to know that livestock can serve their purpose without distress to them. Jacques always makes sure that there are extra animals in the holding pen so that a single lamb or cow isn't left alone to be the last caught, which can be stressful to them. They are quite content when in a larger group, and taken out one by one.

Participants watching a lamb being processed

A boat load of Salt Spring Island producers came especially to see the abattoir, since they do not have an inspected facility on Salt Spring Island and are currently working hard to get a licensed mobile abattoir for their local production. Eric and Sue Boulton came all the way from Gabriola Island to see the upgraded abattoir. The Boulton's also upgraded their facility on Gabriola, where they process 80 of their own beef and about 100 lambs each year for the surrounding community. Eric stated that having a licensed facility saved his farm. It would be ideal if each island had its own licensed facility for the community to share, either privately or community owned and operated.

Vancouver Island and Outer Gulf Island participants

Salt Spring participants heading back to their boat on the Saturna version of rapid transit.

The field day ended with a tour of Campbell Farm, through their forest of incredible old growth trees and a visit to the most beautiful beach at Taylor Point . Taylor Point is part of the Gulf Island National Park Reserve, but was originally part of the farm. Thank you to the Campbells - Jacques, Nan, Tom and Jim for their hospitality and the time they took to not only give us a tour, but to show us how their farm and community work cooperatively together for everyone's benefit.