A Mobile Abattoir

Posted on December 16, 2009 | Leave a comment. This post is not about honey. It’s about a mobile abattoir and local agriculture. Nothing graphic, but some of you just might not be interested. If you are, read below.

In 2008, Olds College commenced operation of the province’s first mobile abattoir, a pilot project headed up by Alberta Agriculture and Food. A 53-foot trailer pulled by a semi-truck, the mobile abattoir is a fully functional meat processing facility, capable of handling a carcass right from the kill to the packaging and chilling.

This isn’t anything too new: much has been made of mobile abattoirs throughout Canada over the last decade, particularly in some regions of Alberta where abattoir capacity is constrained. Lars Jorgensen, a former Vancouver chef, began operating a mobile unit licensed for beef, buffalo, and lamb in Northern BC last year, with plans to operate a Canada-wide fleet in the future; before that, the Yukon government put Canada’s first mobile abattoir on the road in 2007.

Mobile abattoirs are expensive to run, but because of the transport costs involved with shipping cattle to provincial abattoirs, they end up being cheaper, particularly for small producers.

I hear Olds College intends to sell their unit early in 2010. Imagine a CSA with a mobile abattoir as its centerpiece. It would be able to process meat from organic producers, those with too small a scale to make shipping it out to Cargill profitable; it would also handle game and niche meats, and provide small, local farmers with a direct link to their customers. And you can’t discount the improved quality of life for the animal, not having to be jostled onto a crowded trailer and shipped off to die. In fact, there is some evidence that lower stress translates to increased tenderness in an animal’s meat.

These units are costly to build, running upwards of $250,000, and they won’t replace large industrial abattoirs. But they do have many benefits, including the environmental and economic benefits inherent in supporting local agriculture. More numbers are needed to determine whether this unit is viable for a CSA or a private operator in Alberta, but hopefully there are some interested people willing to look into it when it goes up for sale next year. I’ll be following it and posting what I find out here.

Here’s an article from the Olds College News with some more details on the mobile abattoir; here is one on Lars Jorgensen; and here is one on the Yukon’s mobile abattoir.

Sumber Artikel: http://stickymouthhoney.ca/