Federal Regulations Suppress Innovation, Small Producers, and Small Processors

Slaughter house regulations for USDA meat are an example. A small slaughter house requires a basic set of approved equipment on the kill floor, just as larger slaughter houses, but has lower output across which to spread the cost. Federal food policies also hurt. Federal food policies are designed to provide low cost commodity protein and grain. This has the benefit of reducing the percentage of consumer income dedicated to provisioning, but has the disadvantage of lowering the profit of the producer to the lowest level. Sufficient profit to sustain a business can only be made through high volume output. In our investigation of cattle slaughter houses, the owner of a large Baltimore slaughterhouse told us, after reviewing the costs and prices for his services, that he makes his money primarily on the sale of hides from the slaughtered cattle, not from the service of slaugher itself. Another example is offered  by meat fabrication. The large, cattle slaughterhouses of the Midwest do not have butchers. Rather, they have disassembly lines, where each worker makes only one or several cuts. It is almost unskilled work. The opportunities for genuine butchers, who can cut a whole carcass into its cuts or can prepare custom cuts (for instance, for ethnic markets and religious markets), have largely disappeared. In southern-southeastern counties of West Virginia, our business associate could find only one (!) such butcher to fabricate her grassfed beef. As a result of such regulations and policies, small slaughter houses and small processors are unable to stay in business. Their failure limits the growth of small, local, and organic farms, because the farms do not have local processors. As a result, the locovore market remains stunted and underserved, despite rising demand from restaurants, specialty markets, and households.