Small Farms in a Big World: Meatpacking
- Laura Wayte
- Feb 6
- 4 min read
There are a lot of discussions in the media about how we process meat in this country, and we hope the visibility of this topic continues. The problems in meat processing directly affect our business and the general availability of meat in local food systems.
From the perspective of a small livestock farm, we worry about transparency, fairness and cost in bringing healthy and local meat to our community. The meat packing industry has become increasingly consolidated in the past 50 years, disrupting markets for ranchers, reducing transparency, increasing environmental impacts, and threatening food-chain resiliency.
In the U.S., the government regulates the meat industry to make sure the food is safe and plentiful. Federal and state laws regarding how farms are inspected, how slaughter houses work and how the food is labeled came about as a reaction to producers who cut corners and used the cheapest methods usually with profit as the main goal. To solve these problems, laws were passed governing how a meat product gets to market, safety for employees, health of the animals and proper storage and handling. These are not controversial goals.
We work within those regulations but our animal husbandry methods as a regenerative farm exceed the basic USDA requirements in many ways. Like every producer, we have control over many aspects of how we raise the animals: we decide questions such as whether we feed them any grains (we don't for lamb and beef), the amount of confinement (minimal in order to protect fields), and whether we administer antibiotics or hormones (we don't). These are choices that we make because we have standards around animal welfare and the environment that exceed regulations.
But we do not have as many choices in the area of animal processing. There are, appropriately, very detailed regulations around meatpacking (the slaughtering and packaging of meat products). Those regulations cover slaughter, labeling, packaging, storage and distribution. In the past 50 years, the U.S. meatpacking industry has changed because giant meatpacking conglomerates pressured the market towards commodity production, and lobbied the government to relax regulations. Those changes put pressure on small processors, putting them out of business, and on ranchers who are forced to sell their product at reduced prices. All this turmoil reduces the resources available to the small farmers and ranchers who remain.

In the US, there are two types of meatpacking companies: USDA-inspected and “custom exempt.” Despite the names, both are inspected by the USDA, but at different levels. The product coming out of custom exempt facilities is not qualified to be sold at retail outlets and must be labeled "Not For Sale." It is used by hunters, private owners of livestock and by farmers who sell direct to customers. We do this with our “side sales”, where customers purchase 1/2 or 1/4 of an animal from us and then arrange with the processor for cuts and wrapping.
All the other (non-side sale) meat that we sell through the CSA, farmers markets and via wholesale is processed and inspected by a USDA facility located in Springfield, which is 50 minutes away from the farm. It is the only USDA-inspected facility in all of Lane County.
There used to be many more processors in our area and nationally. Instead of a healthy economy of small businesses we now have a highly concentrated industry where a few large firms dominate production with massive meatpacking facilities and where there are fewer small-scale businesses to serve small farmers. This raises concerns about competition, prices charged to farmers, and about how robust our food system is. These changes have been caused by large conglomerates who lobby our government to create a market that is advantageous to their bottom lines. They have made changes in labor relation rules reducing protection for employees, repealed country of origin labeling laws, prioritized foreign-raised meat, and lobbied for a reduced of oversight regarding antitrust practices.

Today there are four very large companies (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, National Beef) that control at least 80% of all processors, distributors, and packers in the U.S. As for processing facilities, in 1967 there were 10,000 meatpacker businesses, both large and small, in the country, and today there are only 2700 total. In all of Oregon there are 13.
All those pressures have left the American meat industry weakened. Since there are fewer and fewer American ranchers, the meat supply is augmented with imported beef that was not raised to the same standards as American regulations require, and is therefore cheaper. Some worry that if you took away the foreign meat, we might not have enough. This is what is meant by food security: if we don’t have robust systems working under normal conditions, what will happen in upheaval or emergencies?
At Deck we work on a local scale, selling direct to the customers because we believe it is important to create the economy we want to see. If the one remaining processory in Lane County were to close, we would struggle. By shopping with small farmers you are helping us create the solution, one healthy, small business at a time.



