Article: Increase in On-Farm Meat Processing for Local Markets

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Demand for Local Meat Brings the Butcher Shop to the Farm (By Jennifer Kongs – Mother Earth News)

EXCERPT: It’s a common saga for many small-scale local meat producers: Slaughtering time arrives, but without a butcher or slaughterhouse in a several hundred mile radius. The demand for local foods, including sustainable meat raised nearby, continues to skyrocket. Without a simultaneous rise in the infrastructure necessary to process all these animals fresh off the farm, locally raised meat might end up traveling just as far — if not further — than your standard, packaged supermarket meat product. This whole process equates to a bigger price tag at the meat counter: The costs of transportation and slaughtering can add to the price of local, grass-fed meat in a big way.

If the meat can’t make it to the butcher, then why not bring the butcher shop to the meat? Thus was born the mobile abattoir.