Mobile Slaughterhouses: Cutting Costs and Carbon for Local Farmers

Everyone loves an ice cream truck. That familiar, jingling ditty resounds throughout the neighborhood, luring kids out of their homes in pursuit of a frozen treat. One truck can service multiple neighborhoods, while parents enjoy the convenience of an ice cream provider that comes to them. No carting car-fulls of screaming youngsters miles away to an ice cream parlor or grocery store — a luxury that saves stress and carbon emissions.

The neighborhood Mister Softee really isn't so different from the latest trend in sustainable meat, the mobile slaughterhouse. And no, I promise I'm not digressing into a plot from a horror film.

Mobile slaughterhouses first entered the agricultural landscape in Washington when Bruce Dunlop created a unit for the Island Grown Farmers Cooperative. The slaughterhouse is built onto a flatbed truck and travels with an inspector onboard. The vehicle drives to area farms and kills, butchers, and packages livestock all from within the mobile unit. Since Bruce Dunlop's original slaughterhouse, the concept went national, with 20 more designed for chickens and six for cattle.

Trucks driving around butchering farm animals may seem, well, a bit macabre. But these mobile slaughterhouses are poised to revolutionize the locavore movement. The meat industry is dominated by massive, corporate-owned slaughterhouses that cater mostly to factory farmed animals. Livestock march in by the thousands, quickly get killed, and are then shipped to another massive plant for butchering and packaging.

This mechanized, assembly line-type of system works for CAFOs and industrial farms, but small farmers get lost in the shuffle. A sustainable, local meat producer may only need to slaughter a few cows at a time to sell at farmers' markets. In order to do that, farmers need to truck livestock hundreds of miles to a massive slaughterhouse, then pay to have the carcasses shipped to a butchering and packaging plant. Packaged meats are then sent back to the local farmer, who sells his or her wares at the farm itself or at local farmers' markets. The meat may be locally raised, but getting that beef from farm to table requires a ton of shipping, going against the environmental ideals of the locavore movement.

Massive slaughterhouses also come under criticism because of safety concerns. Slaying thousands of animals at warp speed leaves meat open for bacterial and other kinds of contamination. Plus, what goes on at these corporate slaughterhouses is done behind closed doors with zero transparency. Creating an accessible, mobile unit that travels from farm to farm not only cuts back on food miles, it lets farmers know exactly what's happening to their meat and how it's being handled.

Kim Snyder, a Chicago-area organic farmer, wants to start a mobile slaughterhouse in her area. "If we can get this going, I see it going very, very quickly," Snyder told the Chicago Tribune. "How cool would it be for a chef, or just for anyone, to walk out here and choose an animal, then have it slaughtered and pretty much ready to go?"

Indeed, a lack of accessible slaughterhouses is probably the biggest limiting factor for locally produced, sustainable meats. By creating a fleet of units that travels from farm to farm and caters specifically to small farmers, we can ensure that meat is not only ecologically raised and safe to eat, but that it carries a small carbon hoofprint.

Photo credit: Pearson Scott Foresman via Wikimedia Commons