Ranchers Form Co-Op to Address Meat Processing Bottleneck

Last week, just as the sun was peeking through the smoke-tinted morning light in Petaluma, California, Kevin Maloney loaded his cattle, sheep, and hogs onto his truck and headed north to Eureka. The Tomales-based rancher drives five hours each way, every other week, to harvest his livestock. Every minute counts for the animals, but this time, the journey took even longer, since Maloney drove up the winding coastal route to avoid road closures from raging wildfires. Small to mid-size ranchers in the Bay Area are used to driving long distances to one of just a handful of USDA-approved slaughtering facilities in the state. They have learned to manage the logistical acrobatics required to keep their businesses running. They book time slots to harvest months ahead of time—without fully knowing demand or what state their livestock will be in—and make the long drive every time. But that won’t be the case any longer, at least for ranchers who are part of the newly established Bay Area Ranchers Co-Operative (BAR-C). Once up and running, the cooperative will alleviate a bottleneck that’s been narrowing in the industry for years, giving Bay Area ranchers an option to process their meat locally. The 16 founding members, who incorporated as a cooperative in July, plan to acquire a mobile slaughter unit and neighboring cut-and-wrap facility to be stationed in Sonoma County, eventually offering services to the nearly 80 ranchers in the Bay Area. Under the co-op’s management, the facility will provide a much more flexible and autonomous solution for small ranchers with varied harvesting schedules. Ranchers say it’s an approach that’s both more environmentally responsible and more humane. “This is a wonderful model for the ag community to take care of its own destiny,” says Corey Goodman, a seed investor for the cooperative and co-owner of Barinaga Ranch in Marshall, California. “All of the [ranchers] want to have local ways to butcher their animals while keeping their own labor, their own distinctive quality, and their own customers. And this is a perfect way to do it,” says Goodman. Until recently, ranchers have relied on Marin Sun Farms in Petaluma, the only USDA-approved slaughterhouse in the North Bay, to harvest their livestock. Last October, Marin Sun Farms—which bought the facility in 2014 after the previous ownership came to a scandalous end—announced it would no longer process livestock from ranchers outside the company’s own label beginning in January of 2020...MORE