Will Whole Foods’ new mobile slaughterhouses squeeze small farmers?
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Will Whole Foods’ new mobile slaughterhouses squeeze small farmers?
by Tom Laskawy
.Infrastructurally unsound
Will Whole Foods’ new mobile slaughterhouses squeeze small farmers? 4
Posted 5:32 PM on 20 Nov 2009
by Tom Laskawy More from this author
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meat, sustainable agriculture, Whole Foods PrintShare Comment
Jennifer Hashley processes a chicken on her Massachusetts farm.
Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the
moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in
2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.”
While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own
backyard, Hashley knew that selling her chickens would be easier if
she used a licensed slaughterhouse. Nor is she alone in her troubles.
Despite growing demand for local, pasture-raised chickens, small
poultry producers throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even New
York can’t or won’t expand for lack of processing capacity.
It isn’t only small producers who are feeling the pinch—a widespread
lack of processing infrastructure appropriate for small farmers has
caused supply chain problems for the big retailers as well. Whole Foods
—the world’s largest natural-foods supermarket—wants to aggressively
expand its local meat sourcing, according to its head meat buyer, Theo
Weening. But it faces the same limitation as Hashley. Most regions of
the country have “lots of agriculture but nowhere to process,” Weening
told me, adding that the phenomenon is most acute in the northeast.
Whole Foods wants to change all that. In a move that has national
implications, the retail giant has confirmed to Grist that it is
working with the USDA as well as state authorities to establish a
fleet of top-of-the-line “mobile slaughterhouses” for chicken.
Starting with a single unit serving Massachusetts, Connecticut, and
the Hudson Valley, N.Y. area, Whole Foods hopes to offer small farmers
an affordable way to process chickens as well as to vastly increase
the amount of locally-sourced chicken it sells. If successful, this
program could be expanded to any region of the country with similar
infrastructure shortages. ... (cont)
excerpt:
But support for Whole Foods effort is not universal. There is growing
concern over the power large national retailers have over farmers, and
the prospect of Whole Foods moving into the meat processing business
does little to allay it. Fred Stokes, executive director of the
Organization for Competitive Markets, a group dedicated to resisting
agricultural consolidation, lauded Whole Foods for trying to provide
an alternative to the large slaughterhouses, but suggested that
individual farmers lacked the power to go toe to toe with such a
dominant player. Hendrickson also questioned how small farmers could
“maintain their competitive bargaining position” with an entity as
powerful as Whole Foods.
Stokes—along with Fred Kirschenmann, a farmer as well as a leading
advocate for sustainable agriculture and president of the Stone Barns
Center for Food and Agriculture in upstate New York—took serious issue
with one significant element of Whole Foods plan: the set of very
specific guidelines any farmer who hopes to sell to Whole Foods will
have to follow. To Whole Foods’ Weening, this is about providing a
“consistent” product to consumers; to ensure that all Whole Foods
chickens—in Weening’s words—“look and taste the same.” Weening
explained that the company will require participating small farmers to
raise a specific breed of chicken supplied by a specific (local)
breeder, feed them a specific brand of feed (no antibiotics or animal
byproducts allowed) and raise them according to Whole Foods standard
poultry production style, which requires “access to pasture” but does
not require actually keeping the birds on pasture