An Alberta processor that was forced to stop killing sheep more than two years ago is back in business.
Canada West Foods of Innisfail stopped killing sheep older than one year after fears of scrapie, a wasting disease in sheep that was linked to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, made it difficult to dispose of offal.
Rendering companies and the local landfill site didn’t want offal from older sheep.
The company, which still had customers wanting mutton, set out to solve the problem.
“We still had the sales,” said Randy Smith, assistant livestock buyer and grader.
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With the help of the Olds College Composting Technology Centre, it developed a way to compost sheep offal.
“It’s relatively simple technology,” said Donna Chaw, lead scientist on the project.
The offal is chopped and mixed with wood shavings and sawdust and placed in a concrete block bunker that is lined with plastic pipes for blowing air through the mixture.
Intense microbial action quickly reduces the mixture to compost. Some wood chips and small bone fragments are all that’s left in the final mixture after 12 weeks.
Chaw said the compost is disposed at a landfill site because there is still a possibility scrapie may remain.
“I don’t know if scrapie is in the material or not. I assume it could be,” she said.
The compost can’t be tested for scrapie because tests for the brain-wasting disease can only be done on brain tissue.
The centre applied to Alberta’s agriculture and environment departments for permission to dispose of the compost in a leach-protected landfill.
The landfill is lined and the material is buried quickly to prevent scavengers from digging in the material.
Chaw said the college is excited about the possibilities for other meat plants that are no longer able to kill mature sheep.
“We’ve provided them with a waste management option. Now a waste management option is more viable.”
Smith said the compost bunkers will be moved closer to the Innisfail plant once the research project is finished and evaluated.
