When Ahmed Fram first moved from Upper Arlington, Ohio, to a farm near London in Madison County, he wasn’t planning on opening a slaughterhouse on the farm. He and his wife simply wanted a nice place to raise a family away from the crowded city. But after the family moved, friends began asking if they could come to the farm to slaughter their own goats or lambs.

Ahmed realized there was demand for a halal slaughterhouse to supply meat for Muslim families in the area, so he began working with the Ohio Department of Agriculture to design a facility that would meet inspection requirements. “This was only car garages,” he says while explaining how he remodeled an existing building.

The farm and slaughterhouse, called Bismi Allah Farms, opened as a business in 2007. “I call it an accidental business,” says Ahmed’s daughter, Soukaina, who is a senior and active FFA member at Madison Plains High School. About five years ago, the facility was expanded to make room for the slaughter of beef cattle, as well as goats and sheep.

The customer base has grown as well. In addition to customers who want halal meat, the slaughterhouse serves others who have specific processing preferences. For instance, some Christian immigrants from Ethiopia come to Bismi Allah so they can slaughter animals themselves following their own traditional practices.

Although customers can use the Bismi Allah facilities to slaughter their animals themselves, most choose not to. Some don’t know how, Ahmed says. “A lot of people don’t want to get dirty, too,” he adds.

Ahmed worked as a carpenter before starting the business, but he had a little experience with butchering livestock. When he was growing up in Morocco, he helped his father slaughter animals in the halal manner for the family’s use. When he started the slaughterhouse business, he consulted with an Imam from Chicago who verified his halal slaughter practices. He does not stun the animals as typical American slaughter facilities do. Instead, he handles the animals calmly and talks to them gently, without allowing them to see the knife used to cut their throats. He also says, “In the name of Allah,” which helps make the animals ready for slaughter, he explains.

In barns behind the butcher shop, Ahmed keeps livestock on hand for customers to choose from. Ahmed buys most of the sheep and goats from United Producers stockyard in Hillsboro through their weekly auctions. He goes to the auction every week or every two weeks, depending on the demand for animals from his customers. Usually, he likes to keep 30 to 40 sheep and goats available on the farm, but he has room to keep more. He recently stocked up to about 100 animals because he got such a good price on them.

Typically, a customer will come to the farm, select an animal, and then wait for Ahmed to slaughter the animal and cut the meat. “They see it alive and if they want to slaughter it, they can, or I do it,” Ahmed says. Then he cuts the fresh meat according to the customer’s preferences. Customers usually pack their own fresh meat into plastic bags. That way they can sort and divide the meat however they want, Ahmed says. The shop doesn’t offer refrigerator or freezer space, so customers take their meat home immediately after it’s processed.

The business is regulated by the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s Meat Inspection Division. An inspector visits the farm and slaughterhouse once a week to check on how animals are being treated, the health of the animals and the cleanliness of the facilities, Ahmed says.

In the beginning, Ahmed publicized the butcher shop using business cards and fliers, which he distributed to friends and dropped off at mosques in the area. More recently, Soukaina has been helping publicize the business using a Facebook page. “People don’t use paper anymore,” she says. Most customers come from the central Ohio area, but word about the slaughterhouse is spreading. “People are coming here from Pennsylvania and Cincinnati because of our customer service,” Soukaina says. “We try to fill everybody’s needs in some way.”