Excitement is brewing among local farmers and consumers alike with the creation of a hub in Spallumcheen that aims to reduce bottlenecks for small-scale meat producers, and bring local cuts to dinner tables.
Located in the Spallumcheen Industrial Park off L & A Road, the North Okanagan Butcher Hub is billed as a way to help small farmers get their meat products to local consumers and develop jobs in rural areas.
It’s the first of its kind in B.C., and the facility is being used as a blueprint for other rural B.C. communities to follow.
The Small-Scale Meat Producers Association (SSMPA) hosted stakeholders and community leaders at an event and tour of the new facility Thursday, March 26.
“The vision is to be able to replicate this in other communities,” said Annelise Grube-Cavers, event emcee and co-owner of Fresh Valley Farms.
“We know that small-scale livestock producers have had trouble accessing processing and affordable processing, and not having to truck animals too far. There are a lot of issues that could be solved with the replication of this kind of project.”
The Butcher Hub had its soft launch in September, and through the busy fall season to the end of December it produced roughly 50,000 pounds of meat, or about 200,000 meals. That was with the facility running at 60 per cent capacity, “so the capacity potential is quite large,” Grube-Cavers said.
Farms from the local area and as far as Falkland and Nakusp are having their meat processed at the Butcher Hub, and there are talks of Kelowna farms having their meat processed there, too.
Vernon-Lumby MLA Harwinder Sandhu, as the parliamentary secretary for agriculture, and someone who grew up on a farm, was pleased to see the initiative take flight.
Sandhu congratulated head butcher Matt Kemp and the entire team that put together the facility. She thanked the Ministry of Jobs and Economic Growth for the $1 million grant it provided.
She said the facility strengthens agriculture “by supporting farmers and ranchers, and it’s creating new opportunities for small-scale producers. It also contributes to a wider community by creating skilled jobs and boosting our local economy.
“But the most important factor is a shorter food supply chain,” she said.
Food supply chain disruptions can have large economic and food supply impacts. After the closure of major B.C. highways due to flooding events in 2021, thousands of litres of milk were being dumped by farmers in the province, as one example.
Grube-Cavers said before the Butcher Hub, local farmer could potentially not be able to book an animal for slaughter at all.
“You might call every abattoir that’s within any kind of driving distance, and no availability,” she said.
She added that when the COVID pandemic started, a lot of people were homesteading with a couple animals, and that made the bottleneck even worse.
She said pigs are normally slaughtered at six months, but farmers were then getting calls from abattoirs two months prior saying their slaughter date was cancelled.
Such cancellations force farmers into prolonged feeding schedules and managing animal welfare well past the typical slaughter timeline.
Grube-Cavers said that scenario is due to both an unavailability of abattoirs and a system of priority given to large-scale producers. She highlighted the Cargill slaughterhouse in Brooks, Alta., where 5,000 beef are processed a day.
“And then around here, they can slaughter maybe five beef a day,” she said. “All of our food system has been into these mega lanes, so then where do the small and the medium fit?”
The Butcher Hub is the answer to that question that has been put forward through a collaboration between the SSMPA, the Township of Spallumcheen, the Regional District of North Okanagan, the Agricultural Land Commission, and the province which provided funding.
It’s another step towards building capacity after most of B.C.’s meat processing industry shuttered due to the mad cow outbreak in the early 2000s, said Grube-Cavers.
The Butcher Hub will also be an education hub, with Sandhu noting she saw Thompson Rivers University educators at the event.
“We definitely have room to grow this business, not just in the amount we can process but also in teaching people,” Kemp said.
And as proof that local meat tastes better, some value-added sausage was on offer at the event for attendees.