Lack of meat processing plants hurts Nevada County agriculture, economy

This system only works if there’s a group of dedicated, flexible customers and only then on a small scale: on a given ranch, five head of cattle or 35 head of sheep, goats or swine can be slaughtered this way in a month.

“Without the availability of [a nearby] USDA plant or a USDA cut-and-wrap, it limits all small farmers,” said Strong. “People see the beef in the county, they see that cow on the other side of the fence, but we’re limited in the audience we can sell to.”

Strong appreciates that custom exempt processing allows her animals to complete their lives on the farm where they were born, instead of stressing them with an hours-long trailer ride to a USDA-inspected slaughter facility.

However, mobile slaughter operators and approved butchers are still few and far between. Strong has to book at least six months in advance with her preferred harvester and attempt to match those dates with her butcher. She also has to hope that her steers will be in the right condition – not too thin or too fat – on the day she picked. Animals’ body condition has become harder to predict six months out, given increasing periods of drought and climate-related environmental changes.

Alana Fowler, who runs Fowler Family Farm in Grass Valley with her husband Brad, uses custom exempt processing to sell her beef, too. She said the small number of mobile slaughter operators and approved butchers means ranching communities are dangerously reliant on a handful of businesses for survival.

“That’s the bottleneck for raising animals in this county: places to take them [to be slaughtered], and then to trust that the place you’re getting cuts from will give you a good yield back,” Fowler said. “Without the competitive factor, the price we’re getting charged for that piece of meat – and what the customer is paying – is a huge issue.”

Processing infrastructure matters beyond ranching

The lack of meat processing infrastructure creates ripples beyond the ranching community. It’s bad for the county’s economy. The growing demand for high-value, local meat should support the livelihoods of Nevada County ranchers, slaughterhouse workers, butchers, refrigerated truck operators, community market employees and more. But the lack of nearby processing facilities – on top of the other hurdles ranchers face – makes it hard to bring those products to market and realize economic benefits locally.

These supply chain issues also imperil an important tool for fire mitigation: grazing. Targeted grazing of sheep, goats and cattle reduces fuel loads and creates firebreaks. Grazed land can serve as staging areas for firefighters, too. As opposed to mowers, grazing is a safe way to manage vegetation on steep slopes and avoid dangerous sparks from mower blades. Nevada County herds and flocks need a functioning supply chain to stay in business and continue providing grazing benefits.

Past efforts stall, facility concerns remain

A promising effort to launch a USDA-inspected slaughter facility in Placer County stalled in 2017 after several years of development. The business, Sierra Foothills Meat

Company, was recommended by a 2016 feasibility study funded by the USDA and Placer County. People involved with the project say a lack of capital was the primary reason it did not succeed, but that the absence of a willing operator and suitable location with amenable neighbors also contributed to its failure. Several more efforts to open a slaughterhouse in northern Nevada were also blocked.

Dan Macon, the UC Cooperative Extension livestock and natural resources advisor for Placer, Nevada, Sutter and Yuba counties, cautioned that building one local facility is unlikely to solve the bottleneck ranchers experience. A single new plant would likely experience the same problems as other regional slaughterhouses – high demand, little flexibility in scheduling and preference for clients with more animals. “It’s far more complicated to work with 300 producers who bring five animals each than with five producers who bring 300 animals each.”

“In my mind, the only way to address this need for scheduling flexibility for the producer would be to build a plant with excess capacity, which is not economically efficient,” Macon said.

He pointed to the challenge of attracting private investment to a low-return, small-scale service business. But there may be signs of hope in this respect. In 2020, a mobile USDAinspected slaughter business launched in Sonoma County with the support of private and producer investment. The Bay Area Ranchers Cooperative raised $1.2 million from private sources; one pitch suggests investors could expect returns of 2 to 4 percent. Whether these returns can be realized remains to be seen.

Macon explained another wrinkle: Most ranches in Nevada County don’t sell meat at all. Instead, they sell weaned calves or lambs to other operators that bring them up to finished weight before slaughter. This system allows ranchers to stock more animals seasonally and avoid the significant time commitment necessary for direct marketing. These ranchers would need to overhaul their business and production models to take advantage of a USDA slaughter facility in the neighborhood. Macon isn’t sure how many ranchers would make the switch.

“These are complex issues,” Macon said. “Additional processing capacity is just one piece of the puzzle.”

What community members can do

While there are no active proposals for new USDAinspected slaughter or cut-and-wrap facilities in Nevada County, ranchers like Fowler, Strong and Applegarth hope the public will support a project if and when the right one emerges. Before that time comes, they want to educate the public about the “invisible middle” links in the supply chain that connect them and their customers.

In the meantime, they recommend people support local ranchers with their dollars. The Nevada County Food & Farm Directory has a producer list and buying guide. They also recommend staying in touch with the processing issue by becoming a part of the Nevada County Food Policy Council or attending Nevada County Agricultural Advisory Commission meetings.

EPA Releases Controversial and Detrimental WOTUS Ruling

On December 30, 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published yet another new rule defining the waters of the United States (WOTUS) under the Clean Water Act by rolling back the Trump-era Navigable Waters Protection Rule. The ruling creates significant regulatory complications, as the federal government will conduct “case-by-case” determinations to assess whether a feature is federally regulated moving forward.

This ruling was issued despite longstanding, bipartisan opposition to the elimination of the aforementioned agricultural exemptions. It should be noted that certain WOTUS exclusions for certain agricultural features were reinstated under the final rule following significant work from our affiliates. Landowners, ranchers, and farmers will now have to wait for a Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision on Sackett v. EPA, which will hopefully provide much-needed clarity related to the definition of WOTUS.

Why this matters: Regulatory uncertainty compromises livestock producers’ ability to do business, and everyone suffers when federal agencies attempt to preempt federal court decisions. As stated by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s (NCBA) Chief Counsel Mary-Thomas Hart, “for too long, farmers and ranchers have dealt with the whiplash of shifting WOTUS definitions.” The EPA ruling’s continuation of regulatory uncertainty will create “a significant and costly burden for agricultural producers”, according to Hart. Landowners, ranchers, and farmers will now have to wait for the Supreme Court’s decision on Sackett v. EPA in early summer, which should provide much-needed clarity and potentially render EPA’s new definition unworkable.

GOP Deadlock Over House Speaker Finally Breaks

In the late hours of Friday night, the House of Representatives finally voted to elect the Speaker for the 118th Congress. After 15 ballots, presumptive nominee Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) narrowly garnered the necessary support to win the chamber’s top position. With Democrats remaining completely united behind minority party leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and the conservative camp of holdouts backing anyone but McCarthy until the very end, this contest for Speaker was the longest in more than a century. Due to the days-long delay in the election