Market Farming

[Sojourner <sojournr AT missouri.org>]

Shelley Pasco wrote:
> 
> How about if your customers own their birds before they're slaughtered?
> Shelley

To paraphrase Monty Python, "(The USDA) won't fall for a cheap trick
like that."

Nope, no go.  We can still get away with that with beef, pork, and lamb,
to a certain extent, by selling the live animal to the buyer for one
dollar and then charging the actual expenses of raising and butchering
the animal at a small local slaughterhouse that is approved for direct
to consumer private slaughtering under the heading of "handling fees". 
This is still only quasi-legal; the USDA COULD shut this down at any
time as well.  The buyer must pick up the meat direct from the slaughter
house in this case.  These slaughter houses are not licensed for resale
- e.g., you cannot have them cut and package and then resell the
packages, nor could you resell to a restaraunt.  The consumer
him/herself must pick up the meat.

If there was a local slaughter house willing to do poultry, which there
isn't around here, we could probably treat poultry like large livestock,
but there isn't, so we can't.

If the consumer "owns" the bird prior to sale, then the consumer is
supposed to do the slaughtering.  So YOU could get in trouble for
unlicensed meat processing if you tried to make an end run around the
on-farm limits by "selling" the live bird to the consumer and then
slaughtering it for them.  Same goes for any livestock, that's why you
have to put them through a small local slaughterhouse to stay on the
razor's edge of legal.

-- 
Holly ;-D
Contrary Peasant
sojournr AT missouri.org