On-farm slaughter growing in rural Vermont, but depends on services of itinerants; USDA rejects requests to relax rules

Itinerant slaughterers load a quartered beef carcass after an on-farm slaughter.
The meat will be taken to a slaughterhouse to be processed and packaged.
(Photo by Alex Driehaus, Report for America/Valley News)

Since the intense meat shortages and processing-plant closings of the early pandemic, itinerant slaughterers in rural Vermont have become an increasingly popular way for farmers to kill animals for personal consumption, reports Frances Mize of the Valley News of West Lebanon, N.H., and White River Junction, Vt. Now, as a means to ease backlogs in those abattoirs, Vermont livestock producers are looking for ways on-farm slaughter meat could be sold more broadly.

Last year, Vermont's farm and ranch community asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture "to allow meat from on-farm slaughters to be sold in small 'animal shares,' which would operate like community-supported agriculture," which lives on annual subscriptions from consumers. USDA declined, "but before the refusal, and with renewed force since, Rural Vermont, a Montpelier-based nonprofit focused on bolstering community-scale agriculture, has continued advocating that the rules be relaxed so consumers and farmers alike have more choices," Mize reports.

Mize gives readers an up-close description of on-farm slaughter. She attended a kill at the home of farmer who had hired an itinerant slaughterer, and wrote: "Tom Havill’s herd of cattle watched from a hillside as one of their own — secured in a holding pen — lost its life to a single shot fired by Chet Miller," Mize reports. Havill told Mize that he still can’t watch his animals being killed.

Miller told Mize he also has mixed feelings about his work: "It’s not a glorious occupation. I have a lot of people who appreciate me, and my calendar is full of people that need my help. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and what I’m doing lays heavy on me.” Mize writes, "Some are advocating that the service Miller offers farmers through his work — doing the difficult job, which many of his customers couldn’t do themselves, of killing the animal that they’ve raised — should be reconsidered as a tool toward a more versatile, modernized food economy."

Caroline Gordon, Rural Vermont’s legislative director, told Maze, “People are feeling that the need for more resilient food systems has become apparent. The trust and transparency of our current economic system was called into question during the pandemic. . . .On-farm slaughtered meat allowed to be sold as a product, even within a small market, could alleviate some of the stresses on the slaughterhouses, some of which are booked up for many months."