Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Make a sustaining gift today to support local journalism!
A food blog from NHPR news, digital, & programming staff, exploring food & food culture around the state & the New England region. On-air features air Thursdays on All Things Considered and Saturdays during Weekend Edition.

Growing Pains: Why Three New N.H. Slaughterhouses Won't Fix The Slaughterhouse Shortage

  According to the USDA, Americans are producing and eating more locally-raised food every year.  But the market for local meat has trailed behind the market for local produce.  Until recently, reasoning has been that there’s a shortage of local slaughterhouses. But as three slaughterhouses open their doors in NH this year,industry-wide studies show that more slaughterhouses may not be the answer, after all. 

Hear the first installment of this series.

Pete and Tara Roy ran a small slaughterhouse in Vermont before they decided to expand. They turned away good customers for five years straight. So about a year ago, the couple built this, bigger meat cutting plant across the river in N. Haverhill, New Hampshire. Pete Roy has a bandana tied tight around his head.  As he leads me onto the kill floor, one of his five kids trail behind us.

Roy points to a pneumatic lift and giant stainless steel saw. He says considering the capital it takes to build a new facility at all, it was go big, or go home.

We got 10,000 feet here we had two in our other plant, this is way bigger. Our capacity, the infrastructure is here to kill 40 or 50 beef a day, we don't have the equipment or the manpower, nor do we have the demand, but we built the shell, the infrastructure is all here to grow significantly.

Like all USDA slaughterhouses, the Roys’ facility has to have an office and a separate bathroom for a full time USDA inspector.

To run such a big plant, they also need more employees.  At the old place, they had eight. Here, the family employs 24. But, Roy says, so far they only have enough business to slaughter three days a week.  Pete’s wife Tara says that’s stressful.

Here we have so much invested, there's a lot more to lose.

Tara says when they opened a year ago, there was just one other game in town

At the time there weren’t that many distributors in New Hampshire, it would have just been us and LaMays...

See as long as anyone can remember, there has been only one USDA slaughterhouse in New Hampshire: LaMay and Sons, in Goffstown.  But after the Roys opened their plant, a third USDA slaughterhouse opened in East Conway. And a fourth is scheduled to open in Barnstead, this fall.

LaMays says they turn away customers all year long.

And the way farmers see it, these new slaughterhouses are a long time coming. Many say there’s been a slaughterhouse shortage.

LaMay’s is crazy-booked, in season

That’s Ray Connor. She owns a farm in Pittsfield with 15 pigs and a few hundred chickens. Like a lot of farmers in New Hampshire, she wants to raise her pigs on pasture in the spring and summer, then take them to slaughter in fall. She does not want to keep them alive in the winter:

It’s more feed, they don’t gain weight when they’re cold, and they don’t move around, and there’s lots of poop. For me, that’s like, antithetical to my farming.

But during the autumn busy season, slaughterhouses across New England turn away small farms like hers. They just aren’t as lucrative as the bigger farms.  Last winter, Connor couldn’t get an appointment until January. Her pigs were in snow.

Plus, Connor says, getting her animals to a slaughterhouse with openings means driving all the way to Maine or Vermont.

Each drive to slaughterhouses is between 60 and 90 dollars, and then I have to go back to drop off the cuts, you're looking at 4 trips, $250 and almost a week's worth of my hours

That’s why Connor says more competition is really good news.  She can’t wait for Russ Atherton to open his new facility in nearby Barnstead.

But it’s not that simple.  While farmers rejoice about all the new options, some researchers are concluding that more slaughterhouses may not be the answer. The USDA recently commissioned Lauren Gwin, a professor at Oregon State, to look into the so-called “slaughterhouse shortage.” Since slaughterhouses cost a couple million to build, and are expensive to operate, Gwin says hav ing a lot of them is often inefficient:

For the processor to start that equipment, he's got to have enough of a volume to go through it.

In VT, a meat processing task force has decided that building slaughterhouses is not the answer to inefficiencies in the meat processing system.

At Pete and Tara Roy’s plant in N. Haverhill, a meat cutter saws chunks off a cattle carcass, and passes them to a line of butchers who cut and package it. 

This has been tougher than I expected.

Roy says he’s not sure there is enough livestock in NH to support four USDA slaughterhouses:

I think there’ll be some failures.

Lauren Gwin says Roy may be right.  But if more processors aren’t the answer, she says, something still has to change.

I'm not sure it serves local food ultimately, to have all these local farmers in all their small trucks, shipping all these animals in small batches up and down the road all the time. 

She says the market will be happiest when small farmers get together to share transportation costs. And, she says, farmers need to work with slaughterhouses to coordinate their livestock schedules well in advance.

For his sake – Pete Roy says that kind of consistency is good for everyone:

I mean if a guy is bringing something in every week, you don’t tell him sorry cuz a guy with one goat wants … I mean, it’s consistency you appreciate the most.

As for the future of those three new N.H. slaughterhouses? We’ll just have to wait, and see.

Related Content

You make NHPR possible.

NHPR is nonprofit and independent. We rely on readers like you to support the local, national, and international coverage on this website. Your support makes this news available to everyone.

Give today. A monthly donation of $5 makes a real difference.