Among the topics legislators heard at a public forum on coronavirus relief in Rapid City Thursday was state support for local meat lockers. Right now, there is no such state support: local meat lockers are part of the small-producer realm of agriculture that our Big-Ag-blinded state Department of Agriculture almost completely ignores. If you’re not running or slaughtering thousands of head of livestock or creating hundreds of jobs, Pierre has no time for you.
But while I’m all for at least balancing the state’s portfolio of investment in agriculture to include small-scale local producers and processors, I’m not sure legislators are looking at the local-meat problem the right way.
First, they are hearing suggestions to use federal CARES Act money to boost local slaughterhouses:
Gary Baker, a Hermosa, area rancher, had already talked to local legislators about using some of the CARES Act cash to help small local meat lockers expand, upgrade or obtain federal inspection. Before COVID, cattle owners seeking slaughter services at a local meat plant often had a three-month or more wait in order to get an animal in for butchering. During and since the COVID pandemic pinched meat processing and distribution channels, more consumers are looking for locally produced beef, and the wait to get an animal slaughtered at most local plants is at least a year.
Locker plant operators cite struggles in keeping good help, challenges in obtaining federal inspection, and the overwhelming expense of updating equipment and cooler space as some of their biggest obstacles [Carrie Stadheim, “SD Lawmakers: Use Fed Funding for Locker Plants,” Tri-State Livestock News, 2020.09.11].
Workforce, inspection, and capital are all real obstacles to expanding local meat processing, and we could implement a number of good policies to help small operators overcome those obstacles. But CARES Act dollars aren’t a gift card redeemable on any good idea lawmakers might have. CARES Act dollars are supposed to be used for coronavirus relief, to help people who have been hurt by the pandemic and the concomitant recession. Local butcher shops aren’t suffering because of coronavirus; they’re making money ham over fist. Coronavirus has been good for the butcher business. The Legislature’s Appropriations Committee’s suggested criteria for CARES Act grants to small businesses should include that the businesses have suffered losses of revenue of 25% or more due to coronavirus; giving CARES Act money to businesses that are making more money amidst coronavirus seems to contradict the purpose of coronavirus relief as much as Governor Kristi Noem’s use of CARES Act dollars to launch her personal national TV ad campaign.
Baker’s suggestion of using CARES Act money to bring in more federal inspectors also seems to miss the point and the prospect of local production. State inspection already allows local lockers to sell local products to local customers:
Moving cattle though local slaughter channels would mean potentially more in the pockets of local ranchers (who have to sell the animal on the hoof unless they are utilizing a state or federally inspected facility), would provide more jobs and would provide consumers with locally produced beef. Meat from state or USDA inspected plants can be sold by the cut; state-inspected meat can only be sold within South Dakota, while federally-inspected meat can be sold anywhere across the globe [Stadheim, 2020.09.11].
Federal inspection is only an issue for producers trying to plug into the export market (“export” being used broadly to refer to South Dakota sales to Minneapolis and Chicago as well as Mexico and China). But it’s that very model of anti-local sales that the big CAFO/meatpacker oligopoly uses to crush small local producers. Local meat processing and sales are meant to meet local demand, help local producers push out the competition from faceless far-flung factory farms, and keep more dollars circulating in local economies. Get your neighbors to buy your product, and you don’t need to monkey around with federal inspectors or interstate/international shipping.
Besides, even if some local butchers can chop enough meat to feed their neighbors and ship profitable cuts to Wyoming and Timbuktu, that’s not a coronavirus relief issue. That’s a separate and deeper issue about where South Dakota should be focusing its agri-economic (argi-comic? Kristi and Hunter do make me laugh) development efforts.
Financial support and regulatory relief for local butcher shops are good policy ideas. They are part of a broader set of reforms, like clamping down on CAFO size and pollution and plugging local butchers into small farms and production cooperatives. But they aren’t part of the discussion of how to spend federal coronavirus relief dollars.
(Then again, if the state would like to admit that giant factory slaughterhouses like Smithfield make the impact of pandemics on workers and the supply chain worse and that support for far more small-scale local butcher shops would shorten and decentralize our entire food production system, protect workers from coronavirus, and protect consumers from supply chain disruptions, maybe we could cast subsidies for butcher shops as a reasonable investment of coronavirus relief dollars in long-term pandemic-proofing of our food supply….)
Nailed it Cory. Federal inspectors have been cut by trump/Sonny for sometime now. The key to COOL is local production and local sales. Hire more South Dakota inspectors for South Dakota meat production. Hell, even I can figure that out. Fact is, Tinker Belle GNOem and her financial supporters don’t want that independence from ranchers and farmers. Give them that and they might think that a social government approach to their finance and delivery problems would be a good thing. Better to keep them under thumb and dumb.
Sounds like the local butcher shops need to get bigger so that they can hire lawyers who will then appear to show the shops are losing money and then apply for a gov. handout.
I think food security/food quality is important enough to use funds to begin to restructure the way meat is supplied. The wait times are a problem, so if there is a way to improve that while not just reinventing factory meat, it’s worth some seed money.
Another silver lining is exposure of corrupt capitalist systems that do mot function as necessary for the good of ordinary residents. I get down, but then i get up! What an exciting time to be alive IF WE WIN.
Granted, Don Pay, new ideas are important but Covid funds aren’t there for research and development. I agree with Cory, that like the local butcher shops with month long lists of customers waiting to be serviced don’t need Covid funding. No more than the pharma companies looking for a vaccine would deserve them form these funds on top of what the gov’t already has given them for research. But, first hog at the trough in South Dakota gets fattest, quickest.
iowa’s wingnut goober guv spent 460k Cares act bucks on salaries and bonuses for her staff. Just saying.