It has taken two years and a lot of red tape, but Johnny Rijavec will soon be moving his boning knives from his mobile slaughter operation to a new provincially inspected packing plant in northern Alberta.
Rijavec has two operations. He custom slaughters cattle in the mobile plant and packages the meat for farmers for their own use. He also makes sausages that he sells to the public, using meat bought from provincial or federal slaughter plants.
It has become too expensive to buy meat from provincially inspected plants to make sausage, said Rijavec, owner of Johnny’s Sausage and Meats in Grimshaw, Alta.
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“The costs were getting astronomical for having my own beef slaughtered elsewhere.”
The cost of slaughter in a provincial plant was especially prohibitive for animals older than 30 months.
It cost Rijavec $40 to have the animal slaughtered, plus an additional $20 if the animal was older than 30 months. Before the meat could be released to him for use in sausage or patties, the plant had to remove the backbone and other parts of the animal where specified risk materials associated with BSE are found. For a bull with a 1,000-pound dressed weight, it was an additional $200 or more.
“It’s too costly to buy a cow or a bull,” said Rijavec, who gets most of his animals slaughtered at a provincial plant in Grande Prairie, Alta., or a federal slaughter plant in Dawson Creek, B.C.
“I never found cheap cow trim anywhere.”
Plans to build his own plant began before BSE was discovered in an Alberta cow.
Construction will start this spring using a loan from AFSC’s Beef Product and Market Development Loan Program, designed for plants that will slaughter older beef.
All winter, Rijavec’s customers would bring in news articles about government assistance for slaughter plants, but it was only available for federally inspected slaughter plants.
The plant will be the only provincially inspected slaughter facility on the north side of the Peace River.
Rijavec slaughters five to 15 cattle a week through his mobile slaughter business. His new plant will have capacity for 60 head a week, or 120 hogs.
