Animals on the landscape ~ sustainable

meat on the plateby Abra Brynne

Bring Food Home, November 2015

De-animalized meat keeps most consumers from considering the

animals and people that are impacted by the dominant meat system in

North America.

Yet there are considerable environmental, animal welfare, health and human welfare costs to the industrial meat system - all of which are externalized by the large abattoirs.

And when the large meat corporations do make a connection between the meat and the animal it came from, they tend to portray the animals in bucolic scenes like this - which is a photo from my home region in BC.

photo credit: Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, creative commons license.

This is actually how approximately 94% of the Cdn cattle spend the last 120 days or so of their life before slaughter at one of the 27 federally registered cattle slaughter houses across the country. Just three corporations dominate the North American slaughter of cattle, JBS, Cargill, and Tyson. On JBS’ investment website, they proclaim that they have the largest feedlot in the USA and that they are one of the world’s largest beef and pork processing companies. In two weeks, they slaughter more cattle at their Alberta plant than BC’s annual total slaughter of cattle.

There really is another option that contributes to sustainable

landscapes and food systems. But consumers

have a role to play.

When people are rightly outraged and nauseated by industrial meat systems, they tend to jump to an extreme but understandable response by becoming vegetarians or vegans. However, there is another option and it is one that supports the very important “ag of the middle” - the small and medium-sized, full time farms that are so vital to our food security and foodsheds, and the small-scale processors that are an essential link in a sustainable meat supply chain.

Sustainable meat systems for me are where the animals live out their lives able to manifest their natural behaviours, eat what nature intended them to eat, and socialize with their peers. For them to then be slaughtered humanely, we need small-scale abattoirs, ideally in close proximity to where the animals are raised. Stories of the three plants.

There is a long history of negligible profit margin in the meat sector in North America.

Item costSteer, 1260 lbs @ $3.25 per cwt* $40.95

Cost of killing, processing, salt, icing, etc $1.75Freight on 710 lbs @ $0.45 per cwt $3.20

New York selling charges @ $0.35 per cwt $2.48Cost of purchase, processing and transport -$48.38

Sale in NYC of 710 lbs dressed beef @ 53/8 cents / lbs $38.17(Net loss on dressed beef in NYC) -$10.21

Sale of hide, 70 lbs @ $0.09 per lb $6.30Sale of by-products $4.50

Yield from all by-product sales $10.80Net profit from all transactions $0.59

* hundred-weightfrom: Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon

The meat sector is not a career for the faint at heart: This diagram is a profit and loss calculation from the 1880s by a company called Armour.In the 1880’s a few big packers, based in Chicago, ruthlessly set out to put all their competition out of business, selling their meat for cut rates for long enough to put the smaller butcher shops out of business, then using their system of iced railroad cars to ship meat across the nation. In the end, they created a market in which they needed to derive income from previously discarded animal parts after they had deliberately created a marketplace that would not pay for the true cost of meat. Their questionable environmental, animal handling and employment practices were the inspiration for Upton Sinclair’s famous novel, The Jungle. The market expectation of low prices for meat continues to impact the meat sector today, where small scale abattoirs in particular operate with a razor thin profit margin, if any profit at all.

Traditional income streams for abattoirs were

derived from sales to ancillary businesses.

Today they are heavy expense

burdens for abattoirs.

Saleable meat / species: for a steer 43%, 47% for hogs; 41% for sheep; chickens approximately 70% of live weight. The remaining volume for each species is the waste stream.Large plants derive income from derivatives like fetal calf serum markets that are completely inaccessible to small and medium scale abattoirs. Small scale abattoirs that also do cut and wrap tend to derive their profit from cutting up game meat from hunters, who are willing and able to pay higher processing fees that farmers cannot absorb.

In BC we developed this diagram to depict the host of government agencies that abattoirs have to deal with in order to operate their businesses. And for anyone who knows government, you will know that these different agencies do not talk to each other nor do they care when their respective requirements are mutually exclusive or otherwise problematic. There are, inevitably, costs associated with each and every one of these government agencies’ requirements.

The hurdles are real and significant

market access

convenience for large grocers disguised as food safety

Most small and medium-scaled abattoirs are excluded from the national grocery chains. This makes their business model extremely difficult because of the paucity of independent grocers and other outlets that could absorb the volume of meat throughput necessary for viable businesses. The large grocers and aggregators / distributors tend to frame this as superior food safety to be had in federal plants but it is really because they want to be able to ship their product across provincial boundaries.

Large scale processors of animals tend to handle only one species, age and sex of animal in order to make their vastly mechanized systems work as efficiently as possible. Some poultry processors can handle up to 25,000 broilers per hour.This has huge implications for the range of animals on the land and for our dietary intake.

We, as consumers, as citizens, have a role to play in preserving heritage breeds, and biodiversity on the landscape. And it involves seeking out and eating meat from animals that have a happy life and a respectful death.

Thank you!abra@bcfsn.org