Life’s last mile begins for Mark Florenz’s hogs in Keene and culminates across the Massachusetts border.
Florenz ferries 200 pigs through this Via Dolorosa every year, trucking them to a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse in Athol, Mass., not because there aren’t comparable options in New Hampshire but because his consistency has earned him a trusted relationship with the facility, called Adams Farm.
Their exchanges flow year-round. The slaughterhouse handles the killing, and the swine return wrapped in plastic to Florenz’s Archway Farm to be butchered, which means chopping up the meat into smaller individualized cuts. His processing staff of two employees partition the bodies into pork chops and spare ribs, vacuum-sealing, labeling, freezing and readying them for retail. Both the slaughterhouse and his facility are certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
He confirms that he speaks without hyperbole, though with a trace of exasperation, when he says that an inspector visits his farm “literally every day. Literally.” He accepts the imposition for the sake of safety.
“If you’re a homestead and you’re selling to friends and family and you’re small, I support less regulation, less government intervention. But there’s a certain point at which you grow enough in scale that there needs to be some oversight. There’s this kind of naivete that the market will regulate itself and there should be ‘food freedom’, it’s just not practical,” Florenz said.
“There’s a long history of people getting sick from eating tainted meat or Romaine lettuce or milk or whatever it is. There is value in having some oversight,” he said.
His wary outlook found resonance in the state’s highest offices. Last week, Gov. Kelly Ayotte vetoed a bill that would have allowed farmers to slaughter livestock for direct sale to consumers and restaurants within the state of New Hampshire sans oversight from any inspecting authority. The legislation, House Bill 396, would have required the Department of Agriculture, Markets and Food to formulate an annual training around food safety and product labeling and distribution, a guardrail that Agriculture Commissioner Shawn Jasper said his department would not have the staff to support.
Jasper objected chiefly, however, to the position the bill would have forced his department into.
“I informed the governor’s office that this bill requires me to do something which is in violation of the federal law, and I wouldn’t do that,” he told the Monitor.
Born out of labor and sanitation abuses documented in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, the Federal Meat Inspection Act requires that farmers slaughter and process livestock at facilities certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where a department official inspects an animal’s health before slaughter and assesses its carcass. States may establish their own inspection program holding to the same stringent standards as the federal government. Such a program does not exist in New Hampshire, and without an income tax to fund it or the will to operate it on the basis of fees, Jasper said one may never make enough sense to exist.
That leaves livestock farmers with limited options.
Feed economics incentivize many to pursue slaughtering livestock in the fall — since pasture grazing is more cost-effective than feeding with harvested forage, like hay, many animals raised for human consumption only live to see the end of their second summer. From the start of October to mid-November, capacity at slaughterhouses across New England tapers into a bottleneck as producers vie for limited slots.
Farmers who plan accordingly, sometimes making appointments a full year in advance, can bring livestock to one of New Hampshire’s four USDA-certified slaughterhouses, or to others in neighboring states. It’s possible to rely on a custom slaughterhouse and butcher who operates under what’s known as a custom exemption, but only if a farmer intends to use that meat for their family’s own consumption.
Given the permission to sell uninspected meat, farmers would have had the liberty to slaughter and process a limited number of animals per month on their own terms — three cattle, five swine and ten sheep or goats. The meats’ packaging would provide a description of the product; the name, address and phone number of the farm from where it originated; and the date of slaughter.
Menus at restaurants serving uninspected cuts would default to the same language farmers would use to label meat sold directly to the public at a retail location, like a farm stand: “This product was initially processed at the farm and is exempt from state and federal inspection.”
Jasper saw the label as euphemistically “misleading,” but the bill progressed through the legislature regardless. It met the governor’s veto last week, predicated on the violation of federal law and the risk of food safety issues. But even before arriving on her desk, it drew strong divisions among farmers.
The New Hampshire Farm Bureau Federation did not take a position on the bill, citing a split among its members, according to policy director Rob Johnson.
When Amy Matarozzo presented her testimony before the Senate, she did so not as a Federation member but as an individual livestock farmer from Center Barnstead who prizes personal liberty. She brings three cows a month to East Conway Beef and Pork, which carries out the task Matarozzo doesn’t have “the time, the facilities, or the desire” to do herself: killing. Nevertheless, she identified with the tailwind of homesteaders and small livestock farmers who had propelled the bill forward on the principle of choice.
Under the banner of “food freedom,” they formed a vanguard of deregulation seeking to restore a measure of control to farmers.
“There are small farms like myself that do a really good job with our cows and our milk quality,” Matarozzo, who owns LorrenJoyce Farm, told the Monitor. “Why can’t we do that with beef, pork and lamb? We should be able to build a relationship with our customer where they trust us to feed them.”
She keeps a lengthy mental list of criteria that meet her standards for animal welfare and sanitation, composed of boxes she begins checking at drop-off. Her animals need to have food and water at their disposal, and they can’t be kept awaiting their own deaths for too long; the two-hour transport to the slaughterhouse is stressful enough. Once killed, the animals should be hung, chilled to the proper temperature and stored in a spacious cooler with enough air circulation to prevent mold growth. Then, she scrutinizes the packaging for signs of freezer burn or improper labeling.
She said an adverse experience at a previous USDA-certified slaughterhouse disabused her of the notion that federal inspectors were committed to the same fastidiousness as she was.
“You have two years of investment, feeding that animal, caring for it every day. You don’t want to drop it off and essentially let it perish,” she said.
Matarozzo runs her farm with a similar business ethic as Florenz. Each grants that a bottleneck in slaughterhouse capacity exists in the fall, but barring unforeseeable circumstances like an injured animal, they agree that most farmers can avoid being left behind with patience and advance planning.
For the smallest commercial producers, Matarozzo caveated, foresight isn’t the problem.
“Most USDA facilities need you to give them work regularly. They can’t pay their bills with people who do three or four animals a year; they’re not going to take those people’s animals and process them. But for those farmers, that’s a hardship,” Matarozzo said. “People should have the choice, the consumer should have the choice, and as a farmer, I should have the choice, too. People should be able to assess for themselves, this place is clean, it’s honest, I want to use them.”
Matarozzo, who sells raw milk and attributes her own weight loss and “radically changed” health to a carnivore diet, understands that the notion of food freedom can polarize farmers as much as the general public, because of commercial concerns that an outbreak or instance of contamination could compromise customers’ hard-won trust in local food.
But the deregulation movement is increasingly inching from the theater wings to center stage. Robbie Mahrou, a candidate in the race to represent New Hampshire’s second district in Congress, made on-farm slaughter the flagship food policy position of his campaign.
“We do not have the infrastructure to alleviate the burden being placed on small farmers,” he said of his ‘food independence’ platform. House Bill 396, he said, “is extremely light-handed. […] We have the government saying we need to protect you — that usually does not work out well.”
Mahrou, of Walpole, is running as an independent.
The governor’s veto tasked Jasper, the commissioner of agriculture, with convening a group of small producers to envision “a path forward that does not violate federal law putting these local producers at risk for federal action and creating potential food safety issues.”
Jasper said he expects to call the first meeting in September.
