USDA Maps the Need For Small Slaughterhouses

by Kristen Ridley · 2010-06-03 09:00:00 UTC
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Last week the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service released a preliminary report that shows for the first time the lack of availability of meat processing facilities for small farms. The included maps make the information readable at a glance, and the picture is startling.

The survey, part of the "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" initiative, takes a county-by-county look at small farms that gross less than $250,000 annually and compares their concentrations to the locations of small, very small, and state-run processing facilities. Small in this case is defined as 10 to 499 employees, and very small is defined as fewer than 10 employees. It is important to look at the availability of these facilities specifically because large operations are much less likely to care about the needs of farmers, and oftentimes they won't even accept the limited batches that a small farm produces.

What these maps reveal is just what you might expect: There are hundreds of counties boasting high concentrations of small farms, but not a single slaughterhouse.

This is obviously a big problem, and it is encouraging that the USDA is addressing this situation specifically from the perspective of small farms. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack promised when this report was released that this is just the kind of issue that "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" will take on. I hope we soon see some real walk to follow all this good talk.

One other disturbing thing struck me as I scrolled through the maps. The maps are broken down by the type of processing: cattle, hogs, and then poultry. The darker the shade of blue, the more small farms there are in a particular county. The cattle and hog maps show a mottled patchwork that is predominantly blue, with no shortage of large dark blue areas. But when I came to the poultry map, it was like a desert. The map was almost entirely white. This more than anything else I have seen thus far underscores how much of a crisis poultry farmers are facing, as detailed in the most recent UDSA hearing in Alabama. I hope the folks at the USDA noticed the same thing I did, and are really working to fix the problem.

Photo credit: USDA

Kristen Ridley is an artist, foodie, and aspiring grass farmer who earned her Bachelor's Degree at the University of Southern California.

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