Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

RELOCALIZING VERMONT: Farmer and Rural Vermont work to legalize on-farm
slaughter
Submitted by Carl Etnier on Thu, 01/03/2008 - 7:58pm.
http://www.vtcommons.org/node/1042

My wife and I have raised beef and pigs for our own consumption and direct
sale to friends and neighbors. I just recently learned that the Vermont
Agency of Agriculture considers our activities illegal.

Mel Huff wrote an article in the Times Argus about Peter Harvey, a backyard
pig farmer in Calais, who raised three pigs in 2006, had them slaughtered
on his property, and brought the meat to the New England Culinary Institute
(NECI) for the students to learn cutting on. He was doing the porcine
equivalent of donating one's body to medical science, for medical and
nursing students to dissect in their anatomy class. Except that Harvey
expected to get his pigs' meat back, neatly cut and packaged.

When Harvey called NECI the next week to find out how the work on the meat
was coming, he was told that a state meat inspector had seized it. The meat
inspector had come through the NECI kitchen while the cutting was
happening, and he asked where the inspection stamp for the meat was. There
was none, since it was a backyard slaughter operation. Harvey says he
phoned several people at the state, ahead of the slaughter, to make sure
that what he was doing was legal. He understood that, as long as he sold
the meat by the side, and not as individual pieces, that he was within the
law. The people who bought the meat were really half-owners of the pig. The
meat inspector said otherwise.

My wife and I had always believed that selling the meat by the animal or
half animal was permitted for on-farm slaughter operations. We liked that
approach. Instead of being herded onto a strange truck, transported along
bumpy roads, and disgorged into an unfamiliar facility, the animal is
killed quickly in its own territory, before it knows what happened. Often,
we'd call the animal over with a little of its favorite food-grain for a
beef animal, or apples or zucchini for a pig. It would die with its mouth
full of good food.

Rural Vermont engaged Vermont Law School interns to research the Vermont
laws on backyard slaughter, the federal laws they were based on, and how
other states interpret them. Amy Shollenberger, executive director of Rural
Vermont, said that Vermont laws re-state federal laws. The law says that
anywhere “owner” is written into the law, the plural “owners” may
be read, as well. And it also says that on-farm slaughter is allowed for
meat that will be consumed by the owner (or owners) or given to their
workers or non-paying guests. So it's pretty easy to read the law to say
that if someone becomes an owner of half a pig, it is permitted to
slaughter the animal on the farm and sell the half as cut pieces.

Indeed, the state of Maine reads the law that way, according to
Shollenberger. Maine allows the structure of community supported
agriculture (CSA) to be used for meat animal raising, with up to three
owners per animal. They are interpreting exactly the same federal law, but
their interpretation is less restrictive than the Vermont Agency of
Agriculture's.

Last year, Peter Harvey and his neighbors used a CSA structure for the pigs
he raised and slaughtered on the farm. He repeatedly tried to get an
opinion from the meat inspector as to whether that was OK, but the
inspector never got back to him. The inspector had been supportive of what
Harvey wanted to do, Harvey said, but couldn't find a way to say it was
legal. Asked if he thought the inspector might regret ever coming across
Harvey's meat at NECI, Harvey laughed and said yes.

Janet Ancel, the representative from Calais, plans to introduce legislation
to clarify that backyard slaughter and sale by the half animal is legal in
Vermont, according to Harvey and Shollenberger. Roger Allbee, the Secretary
of Agriculture, isn't ruling anything out about what they would support. He
said they are studying the law and other states' interpretations of it,
trying to find a way to support farmers while protecting the health of
their customers.

As Harvey and Shollenberger point out, people have been raising and
slaughtering their animals on the farm since domestic animals were first
kept, and there's probably been trade of half-animals since as long as
economic exchange has existed. I'd like to see the Agency of Agriculture
get out ahead of the legislature on this one and make a rule that
interprets state and federal law the same way the state of Maine does,
allowing three owners of the same meat animal. If they won't do that, I
hope they support Ancel's bill in the legislature. It's time for the state
to get out of the way of people who are trying to raise their own meat and
share it with their neighbors.

====

I interviewed Harvey and Shollenberger on Relocalizing Vermont on WGDR.
Look for downloadable MP3 files of those interviews soon at the Vermont
Peak Oil Network audio page

You can reach me at relocalizingvermont[AT]yahoo.com