PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE – Slaughtering a cow or a sheep isn’t rocket science. For centuries, farmers butchered their own animals with nothing more than a sharp knife.
Enter bureaucracy, however, and things start to get complicated – at least that’s how Lars Jorgenson tells it.
Livestock now must be trucked, in some cases hundreds of kilometres, to multimillion-dollar facilities where they are killed and cut up under the watchful eyes of government inspectors.
Jorgenson, president of Gate to Plate Food Services, fought with various government agencies for three years to convince them that it makes more sense to bring the slaughterhouse to the farm in a mobile unit.
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Jorgenson was invited to speak about mobile processing at a seminar last week in Portage la Prairie, Man.
In January 2007, Jorgenson’s mobile slaughterhouse prototype was approved by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for use under British Columbia’s provincial meat inspection regulations.
A professional chef for 22 years, and former manager of Northern B.C. Buffalo Co., Jorgenson successfully developed markets for bison products in Vancouver.
One of the biggest hurdles he faced as a marketer, he said, was getting his hands on a steady supply of product. Slaughter capacity in his area was limited and quality was spotty.
“Buffalo, like probably all animals, don’t belong in the back of a trailer flying down the highway at 100 km an hour,” said Jorgenson.
“Bison especially seem to take a dislike to it, and beat the living daylights out of each other. We were reaching the point where we were losing 25 to 35 percent of a carcass due to interstitial bleeding, goring, bruising, you name it. Plus, we had stressed-out animals so our shelf life was pathetic.”
With the economics of building a small slaughterhouse too risky, Jorgenson decided to go mobile and work with the livestock industry where it exists, often in remote areas that are underserved by slaughter facilities.
“Let’s see if we can’t go straight to the farm. That’s where we should be doing it. The animals are at home. Boom, it’s done, no stress, no transport. It seemed to be a very sensible solution.”
His mobile slaughter unit offers more flexibility for niche products such as organic and fits the humane slaughter certification requirements of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Local food networks are also better served, he added, particularly in remote towns like Fort St. John, B.C.
“We go to the farm, buy the animals, slaughter them and process them locally. We have now made local product available to local people,” he said. “That was not an option before.”
But even with backing from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, convincing the CFIA to approve his mobile abattoir design was no mean feat.
His sense of justice and belief that his idea had merit sustained him through a three-year fight with bureaucracy. He recalled how early on he received a fax from Ottawa that flatly refused his application.
“No explanation, no justification, just ‘No’. I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m a taxpayer. The CFIA works for me.’ I got really pissed and because I got really pissed I decided that I would never give up.”
Now that he has provincially based approval for the mobile unit, he wants it to be approved as a federally inspected slaughter facility.
“As it stands right now, the CFIA will tell you that it will never happen. But I’ve heard that one before, and I don’t buy it.”
He said the inspectors he works with are excellent but “the policymakers, they need to get out into the real world.”
After a year of operation, he has found on-farm slaughtering eliminates stress and delivers a better quality product with higher yield.
“The goring, bruising and battering that they get in the process of loading, transporting and being unloaded is eliminated. They’re at home, at peace, the water is there and the food is over there,” he said. “That whole stress thing is gone.”
Under the Gate to Plate system, the holding facility used to line the animals up before slaughter is the livestock producer’s own corrals and squeeze chutes. The semi-trailer unit is backed up nearby at a pre-approved site, the cattle are killed, bled by hanging from the farmer’s own front-end loader, and then winched into the unit for skinning, gutting and primary processing.
The provincial meat inspector conducts examinations before and after death at all stages of the process and affixes a provincial stamp on the carcasses before they are hung in the cooler.
Inside the trailer, everything is designed to meet inspection requirements, including a small office and washroom. Work flow for the two workers is set up to prevent contamination and the drains empty into a holding tank underneath.
Offal, hides, blood and specified risk materials are left at the farm for disposal by burial or composting, he said. He charges $150 a head to kill and chill up to 10 large animals such as bison and cattle per day, or $40 a head for 40 lambs or pigs.
To prevent the spread of pathogens as the unit moves from farm to farm, the undercarriage and the wheels of the truck are sprayed with a viricide every morning.
“We spray so we don’t drag stuff from one farm to the other. Does it say anywhere that we have to? No, but I think it is good operational procedure,” he said. “We saw the nightmare with the avian flu in the Lower Mainland.”
Now that the $360,000 mobile slaughter plant is operating four days a week in a 100 km radius of his area, Jorgenson is looking at ways to prove that Gate to Plate’s process is superior.
“Now we can start doing some real scientific testing,” he said. “I can say that the meat looks better, smells better and tastes better, but that’s subjective. Now we’ve got to prove it with the pH levels in the meat and all that.”
For the short term, Jorgenson plans to continue fighting for federal approval. If it makes business sense, he will likely franchise or find some method of expanding to build more units and operate them in other provinces.
