Organic steak is hard to find, partly because so few slaughterhouses are certified organic. (Photo by David Benbennick, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Organic farmers would love to have you dig into more of their pork, chicken and beef. It’s not just because they’re proud about how they raise their animals – it’s because certified organic meat fetches high prices. But organic meat is harder to find than you’d expect, and it’s partly because there are few organically-certified slaughterhouses.
Shawn Allee found a farming community that came up with a solution:
Transcript
Organic farmers would love to have you dig into more of their pork, chicken and beef.
It’s not just because they’re proud about how they raise their animals – it’s because certified organic meat fetches high prices.
But organic meat is harder to find than you’d expect, and it’s partly because there are few organically-certified slaughterhouses.
Shawn Allee found a farming community that came up with a solution:
Dennis and Emily Wettstein turned their Illinois farm organic a while ago, mostly because conventional farming wasn’t practical for them.
“All the money seemed to go to pay for the fertilizers and the chemicals. And then I was more or less allergic to the chemicals. And so we were interested in getting away from that, especially if we were going to raise a family out here.”
The Wettsteins didn’t just raise grain organically – they kept chemicals and hormones out of their cattle.
“We started raising meat for ourselves and our families. Then, pretty soon, just word of mouth, friends and neighbors wanted meat.”
And, they found people who’d pay top dollar for their meat.
“We sell at the Oak Park farmers market.”
That’s just west of Chicago.
“Right. The Oak Park market managers, they are working on all the farmers to go towards organic.”
And that worked for the Wettsteins – they had USDA certified organic chicken.
“There’s one other meat vendor there – it’s not organic. So, we have no competition. We feel that, with that label on there, we can set our price to where we can make a profit.”
But Emily Wettstein says that term – organic – gave them trouble when it came to beef and other meat.
“We were getting a little bit pressured from other people, ‘Well, you can’t call your item organic. You don’t have a processing facility with the term of certified organic.'”
Here was the problem: For meat to get labeled USDA certified organic, it’s gotta be certified from the farm to the slaughterhouse.
The Wettsteins had someone to process organic chicken, but they were out of luck with pigs and cows.
There was no certified slaughterhouse for beef or pork in Illinois.
So, the Wettsteins and some relatives prodded meat lockers to get certified.
There was one taker.
“I’m inside a meat locker that’s about a fifteen minute drive from the Wettstein farm. It’s owned by Scott Bittner, and I’m here to understand what organic certification means for his business. How do I put this, there’s a headless, hoofless, skinless cow hanging from your ceiling. Where are we exactly?”
We’re on the kill floor. We had seventeen, eighteen cattle today. Seven of those were organic.
So, walk me through how you have to treat that organic cow differently.
It’s the first thing we did this morning – that’s one thing. Other than that, it’s segregating it in the cooler from the non-organic product and then processing it at a later time, which, again, you have to do first thing in the morning.
So, the basic idea is segregation?
Yeah, it is. The whole way through. Exactly.
Bittner’s simplifying things, but not much.
He has to clean or swap equipment between batches of organic and conventional meat.
There are rules on the kinds of chemicals he can use. And he hires a certification company to monitor his paper work.
Bittner says overall, it’s easy, and he’s surprised more slaughterhouses haven’t done it.
“Here we’re doing all our fabricating – grinding sausage, ground beef. Cutting some chops, ribs.”
“How does it feel to be the only guy who can process an organic side of beef?”
“I want to keep it quiet – I don’t want too many people to get started doing what I’m doing because it’s nice. I get two or three customers every year that I didn’t have before. When you go to bed at night and think about this economy being the way it is, every little bit helps.”
Bittner says farmers drive animals up to four hours to slaughter their animals here.
He says he’s proud of his work but can’t take too much credit; he knows he’s got a local organic slaughtering monopoly going.
That might change some day, but for now it’s reason enough to keep his knives sharp.
For the Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.