A fire that destroyed his previous business has sharpened plans for one Saskatchewan meat processor.
This month, Dennis Lane and his family will start slaughtering animals at their new Neilburg, Sask., on-farm meat processing plant. The venture is a result of a fire in March 2004 that closed Lane’s Neilburg Fine Foods grocery store and custom butcher business.
Despite the loss, Lane is optimistic about the new enterprise.
“One thing about it: we just walk out the door and we’re at work.”
Along with Lane’s former business, he also custom processed 300 head per year for local farmers, which was maximum capacity for that small facility.
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Since butchering was the profitable side of his grocery business, he decided to use the insurance settlement to build a slaughter facility on his farm northwest of town. He would have liked to help the small community by rebuilding the store in town but “for me personally, this is the best end result. … We’ll do the best we can with it.”
The new building will include 40 sq. metres of air conditioned killing and processing facilities, with freezers, coolers, a kill floor, cutting floor, sausage room and offices. Attached will be 185 sq. metres of covered handling facilities.
“We’ll be able to handle basically any type of livestock,” Lane said. “It’s a custom built livestock system that’ll handle buffalo, elk, whatever, and it’ll be under cover.”
He said the up-to-date enterprise includes $90,000 worth of refrigeration equipment and features the industry standard 3.35 metre rail system. The venture cost more than $350,000 and would have been more had it not been for Lane, his son Jason and neighbours constructing the main structure themselves.
The new plant should be able to process 1,000 head of large framed animals such as bison and beef per year, based on a 14 day hanging period, and any number of smaller carcasses of elk, deer, sheep, goats and pigs, which all have a more rapid turnover, said Lane.
“It’s not massive, but it’s not peanuts, either.”
The business, named North 40 Meat Processing, is a partnership between Lane and his wife Shannon, who works part-time off the farm. Son Jason will be the main meat cutter, and Lane plans to hire five full time and three part time employees from the surrounding area when the facility is running at capacity.
Lane said although there are several other small custom processors in the area, there is room for one more.
He has had many phone calls from within a 100 kilometre radius of his farm, with people asking when he can begin to slaughter their livestock. He said that since BSE, there’s been a backlog of animals waiting to be processed, so he believes his plant will help by adding some capacity. However, “I’m not going to run anybody out of business, by no stretch of the imagination.”
Robert Lundquist, president of Diamond 7 Meats in nearby Lloydminster, Sask., doesn’t think another player in the local meat processing arena will hurt his business either.
Diamond 7 kills and processes 2,500 animals per year with an additional large volume of custom game and specialty processing. The company plans to expand soon, possibly becoming a federally inspected plant.
At this point Lane’s business will be a provincially health inspected facility because he anticipates 90 percent of his business will be local area custom processing, which doesn’t require any higher level of inspection. Lane said if he must become federally inspected, it would just be a matter of building the inspector an office and doing the paperwork.
Lundquist said it’s not necessary to become a federally inspected plant unless exporting meat or selling into major retail chains. Due to the cost of employing a full-time veterinarian and an inspector, going federal isn’t feasible unless one can make a good return through a high kill capacity.
“When you start talking a federal facility, the cost of inspection becomes horrendous,” he said. “You’ve got to be doing at least 100 a day.”
