Mobile meat unit on piloting path

The vast majority of meat reaching consumers comes from major meatpacking plants that work with live animals trucked from feedlots and other farm settings.

Many livestock producers get their own meat on their dinner tables by working with local "custom packs" that cut it up to their specifications and cut and wrap it for home freezers. So long as the meat goes back to owners for consumption, on-site USDA inspectors are not needed.

Advocates of mobile meatpacking units hope to build a system in which slaughter would be done at the farm and hanging carcasses would go to "cut and wrap" businesses that would get it ready for sale to the public. That approach requires that USDA inspectors be present both at slaughter and during processing.

In what the Nebraska Environmental Action Coalition sees as a better meatpacking world, smaller livestock producers would not be at the mercy of the prices offered industry giants.

At the same time, rural consumers who don't raise their own livestock would have much better access to meat produced by people they know within easy driving distance.

And cattle, hogs and other sources of mealtime staples would die a more humane death. They would be spared the stress of a long truck ride to an unfamiliar setting.

The means toward these multiple ends, according to Laura Krebsbach and other coalition members, are mobile meat processing units that come right to the farm to handle slaughter under the watchful eye of USDA inspectors.

"I'd like to build as many as possible," said Krebsbach, a Ulysses resident and a veteran environmental activist in Nebraska. "I'd like to see them all over the country.

"The bottom line is, we want to keep small producers on the land and we want to keep small towns from completely dying away."

At this stage, the coalition has just one unit, on loan to a Kansas feedlot and capable of turning as many as 20 of its steers a day into hanging carcasses.

It will be on display next month at the 26th Farm Aid Concert in Kansas City, Kan. In August, Kresbach expects the provisional inspection status they got from the USDA in June to become final certification.

At Flat River Corp. in Columbus, Jerry Eisenmenger, a man with a taste for new ideas in steel fabrication, is overseeing the conversion of a second open semitrailer to a slaughter-evisceration unit.

Flat River also built the first. "We're well known in our area for doing what you might say are exotic projects," Eisenmenger said, "fabrication and modification projects.

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