Seeking Backyard / Small-scale Poultry Growers!

Author: Hillary Barter

Posted: August 9, 2013

Categories: GoodFoodBites / News from Sustain Members / The Meat Press

Everdale Organic Farm and Learning Centre is looking into building a small mobile poultry processing unit, which would be available for rent for those with backyard chickens or small on-farm flocks (but only those growing poultry for their own consumption, since mobile abattoirs are not inspected by OMAF).  They’re looking for feedback, especially from people who keep small numbers of chickens or turkeys, as they try to figure out if and/or how this model could be useful to these folks.

A short survey is linked to below.  If you raise poultry – for eggs or meat – they’d be grateful if you’d take 3 minutes to fill it out!

Some background…

In many parts of Ontario there seems to be a need for poultry slaughter options closer to homes and farms.  Interest in pasture-raised and backyard flocks of chickens is on the rise, but the number of inspected small abattoirs is shrinking… so we’re seeing more and more people without a good place for their carefully-raised birds to be processed. We’d like to make it easier for people to be involved in the slaughter and processing of their own birds at home, and so we’re considering setting up a very small, mobile, rent-able poultry processing unit that local farmers and backyard growers could use.

Fully inspected mobile poultry abattoirs are becoming more common in other parts of Canada and the US, including British Columbia in particular.  In Ontario, however, there aren’t any regulated mobile abattoirs because OMAF only inspects regular, stationary plants.  However, on-farm slaughter in mobile abattoirs is legal if you’re raising birds only for your own family’s consumption.  As most of you are probably well aware, anyone wishing to sell chickens needs to find themselves an inspected local abattoir to do the slaughtering for them.

And we support the work that these abattoir operators are doing!  They’re providing an essential service and often don’t receive as much support as they deserve. We believe that the challenges facing abattoir operators must be addressed, but with this initative we have a slightly different focus. We’re trying to encourage interest in home-raised, pastured poultry and want to build capacity among small growers in our area.  We want to provide another option for people who want to do their own slaughter cheaply and efficiently on-farm.

It’s not hard to process poultry on your own and of course, many farmers in Ontario have been doing it as long as any of us can remember. But it’s certainly a whole lot more effective if you’re using good equipment and know how to do things efficiently. However this equipment is expensive and usually not worth buying if you only have a small flock.  We’re hoping to make this equipment – and training on how to use it – more widely available.

So! We’re thinking about building a small, uninspected processing unit that would be available for rent to those wanting to slaughter birds for their own families to eat. We’d like to know more about who’d be interested in using this mobile abattoir and under what conditions it would (or wouldn’t) work for them.