Here’s the Beef

This article is published in partnership with The Food Section.

At Wild Turkey Farms in China Grove, Lee Menius knew something was wrong when he called his usual meat processor to schedule a time to bring in a batch of pigs for slaughter.

He’d worked with the same processor for 10 years, and he typically could get an appointment within a week. But it was March 2020, and the COVID pandemic was sweeping the state.

Suddenly, his processor was already booked into August. 

Small farms across the state have long struggled to find facilities to kill and butcher their animals. But when people scrambled to buy groceries in the pandemic, empty meat cases in stores and farmers markets across the state caused a panic, putting unprecedented pressure on the handful of meat processors able to handle livestock from small farms. That left owners of small-scale operations without meat to sell to their customers and with the unanticipated cost of feeding and caring for animals for months longer than usual.

Menius grabbed the first appointment he could get, and then he booked appointments for the next 14 months. 

“We started booking for stuff that wasn’t even born yet,” said Menius, who also works with N.C. Choices, an N.C. State University program that supports and improves the supply chain for local meat producers. 

What happened next, though, almost sounds too good to be true: Within months, North Carolina crafted a government initiative to update small meat processing plants so they could handle more animals more efficiently. While the response was conceived in crisis, the program is still going. 

“That’s a damn miracle that all that fell together that quickly,” said Menius. “COVID brought attention to this sector of agriculture that never had this kind of attention.” 

Rising to Meat the Crisis 

When Joe Hampton, a longtime agriculture agent, came out of retirement to help the N.C. Department of Agriculture address the pandemic-era processing problems, there were grocery stores across the state with empty meat cases.

“We were asked to find those places where we could make a difference,” said Hampton, who spent 31 years working with NCDA’s research stations and has farmed in Rowan County since 1981. “The program should have taken years to roll out, and it took weeks.”

By June 2020, a group including Hampton and representatives from N.C. State University, N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University, and the NCDA had created a program called Increasing Meat Production Efficiency and Capacity (IMPEC), funded by federal COVID relief money. The IMPEC grants were specifically aimed at small meat processors, which typically work with producers who sell at farmers markets and through community supported agriculture subscription programs.

Large meat producers like Smithfield and Tyson, which have their own slaughterhouses to produce huge amounts of meat, weren’t eligible; neither were proposed plants, since North Carolina didn’t have time to wait for new construction. 

The first round of IMPEC funneled $17 million to 23 meat processing facilities across the state, allowing them to immediately update aging equipment. With modern machinery, those slaughterhouses increased capacity and reduced processing times, helping to get meat from farms to consumers faster than ever before.

“It’s one of those programs that’s going to make a difference for a long, long time,” Hampton said.

A Processing House Shortage 

Decades ago, there were small slaughterhouses in every North Carolina county. But over time, agriculture and demographics changed. As suburbs spread, people became less willing to have a slaughterhouse, or abattoir, close to their neighborhoods. Many small facilities shut down, leaving a few dozen venues certified to process meat for sale.

Under North Carolina regulations, there are three levels of meat processors: There are small, uninspected processors that handle things like deer from hunters or a single cow or hog that a farm might use to fill its own freezers. Then there are state-inspected facilities, for people who want to sell to their neighbors or to market customers. Finally, there are USDA-inspected facilities for larger farms that want to ship their meat nationwide or sell across state lines.

As the local-food movement grew in the early 2000s, the small number of state-inspected facilities became a problem. Menius recalls that in 2007, there were only three or four facilities in the whole state that would process his meat and put his label on it.

It has steadily improved, he said, and there are now closer to 30 small facilities, but they’re in scattered locations. Farms with smaller outputs often have to truck their animals 200 or 300 miles to reach facilities in places like Siler City or Wadesboro.

Time and travel costs aside, long trips are harder on the animals. Stressed animals produce more adrenaline, which can affect the quality and value of their meat.

Local producers have tried things like mobile slaughter equipment for chickens, but it’s not very efficient, taking a whole day to set up, process, and clean up after processing animals from a single farm. “The problem of small processors needing some assistance was there long before COVID,” said Hampton. “There was nothing wrong before—if everything worked. But if there were interruptions, there wasn’t a redundancy.”

Hampton said IMPEC targets small operators because they can make improvements quickly, “where the large facilities would have taken years to make the changes.” Most only got $20,000 or $30,000, but he said it made a difference to small businesses that don’t have the kind of consistent cash flow that major renovation projects demand.

IMPEC’s initial efforts were so successful that the program is now in its fourth iteration and has given out a total of $42 million in federal funds. Under IMPEC IV, grant recipients have a longer period to use their funds, and seafood and shellfish processors are eligible for financial assistance. 

Carl Mitchell bought his company, Mitchell’s Meat Processing in Walnut Cove in Stokes County, in 2018. His average customer drives over an hour to bring their animals to his facility, but some come from three hours away. He even gets customers from southwestern Virginia, where there is no USDA-inspected facility.

He spent a $315,000 grant on equipment that allowed him to more than double his capacity, from 20 head of beef a week to 50.

“I don’t think I’ve heard anybody complain,” he said. “It’s been transformative for us. And transformative for the farmers.”

Kathleen Purvis is a longtime journalist, food writer, and author in Charlotte, North Carolina.