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Many plants are booked for livestock slaughter through 2021 and into 2022.

August 20, 2020

5 Min Read
A woman engaging with a customer next to a meat case
BUYING MEAT: Caitlin Straka (left) discusses a product in the meat case with a customer at Straka Meats in Plain, Wis. The meat plant is booked on livestock slaughter well into 2022. Jim Massey

Nearly every day, Dan Weber gets a call from another farmer wanting to know if a date can be booked to butcher a beef animal or pig at his locker plant in Cuba City, Wis.

“People get mad when I say no,” Weber says.

Slaughter demand has skyrocketed at Wisconsin meat markets since the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the U.S. last spring. In April and May, when grocery shoppers had a hard time getting meat at the store, many consumers turned to the local meat markets and started calling their farm friends to see if they could buy some beef and pork from them. At some meat-processing facilities, slaughter slots are booked well into 2022.

Related: Complete coronavirus coverage

“I usually have a one-page waiting list with 28 names on it,” Weber says. “Now I have 8½ pages of names. If I wrote down everybody’s name that called in, I’d have 150 pages. It’s crazy.”

At Straka Meats in Plain, Wis., Caitlin Straka says they have slaughter slots scheduled through most of 2022.

“A year ago, you could have called and gotten an appointment for next month,” she says. “Things are totally different now. I think it’s because farmers can’t get a fair price for their beef on the market. They started finding direct-market customers locally, and they had to find local processors to handle those animals.”

Straka says they have been taking in beef and pigs from lots of new customers, but their regular customers are also booking more animals than they did before.

“We have one farmer, for example, who traditionally books two beef animals a month through the year, and he just booked six beef a month through 2022,” she says. “Some years we hope to slaughter 20 beef the entire month of August. This year we did 25 a week.”

Demand for local meat

At Avon Locker Plant in Darlington, Wis., Roch Ritchie says they are booked through July of next year. He attributes their busyness to more farmers feeding beef throughout Wisconsin and selling them directly to consumers.

“We have been killing 25 to 28 [beef animals] a week,” he says. “People got a taste of good, locally grown animals, and they’re trying to keep their freezers full.”

Rod Aspenson, owner of Westby Locker and Meats in Westby, Wis., says they have been “way busier” in 2020 than they were a year ago.

“I’d say we are up 30%,” he says. “We have gotten calls from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois — people wanting to know if they can get something butchered. We obviously have to limit what we take in, because we only butcher twice a month.”

Aspenson says they put customers on their list and call them two weeks in advance of a potential slaughter date. If they found someplace else to get their animals butchered in the meantime, they move on to the next person on the list.

“I know a plant that’s booked out until October of 2022. Those are beef animals that aren’t even born yet,” he says.

Weber says consumers can get a good price for freezer beef right now because “there’s a lot of it out there.” The hitch for farmers is finding a locker plant that has an opening to get an animal processed.

Before the demand picked up, Weber Meats was slaughtering about 20 beef animals a week. Now a light week is 27 and a good week is as many as 35. They also handle between 40 and 50 hogs a week.

Weber says he processes animals from five summer fairs, so after he books in his regular customers on top of that, he doesn’t have much room for extra animals.

“I could get more people in here to work and handle more animals, but we don’t have the room,” he explains. “Everybody’s in masks, 6 feet apart. If you cram more people in here, you have more chance of problems. If I’m rushing stuff, that’s not the Weber way. If I can’t do it right, I don’t do it.”

Straka says they added three employees this summer to keep up with the growing demand.

“Our employees are amazing,” she says. “They’ve worked extremely long days through all of this. We’re surviving [the busyness] because we have a dedicated team. It’s been good.”

New game

Alex Lease, owner of Outdoor Addiction Taxidermy and Wild Game Processing between Blue Mounds, Wis., and Mount Horeb, Wis., says he kept getting calls from farmers asking if he could process pigs or beef animals. He finally decided to apply for a license to process livestock with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. His application was approved in June.

“Once all this COVID stuff started happening, my phone was ringing off the hook,” he says. “I haven’t really had to advertise the service. I’ve just been taking in animals as people have called.”

Outdoor Addiction does not have slaughter facilities for livestock, so Lease relies on an on-farm slaughter partner. In the first seven weeks he accepted pigs and beef, his company processed 240 animals.

“We were only using the processing plant a few months out of the year to process deer, so I figured we might as well keep it busy,” Lease says.

Weber says when the beef price goes back up, he expects the processing demand to taper off a bit. But that might take six months to a year.

“I’m thinking if I can keep 5% of this extra clientele I’ve been getting, I’ll be ecstatic,” he says. “[The demand] will come back down.”

Massey lives in Barneveld, Wis.

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