In the Burlington Free Press newspaper Sunday edition Green section there is an article by yours truly. It is part of a series of “I Believe…” The editor had given me the writing assignment a couple of weeks ago so I had some time to mull it over. It was an interesting angle to think about things from.
If you’re not yet familiar with our family’s “Big Project”, hop on over to read about how we’re building our own nano-scale on-farm inspected slaughterhouse and butcher shop here at Sugar Mountain Farm. Since banks aren’t lending (despite our bailing them out) we’re funding it by bootstrapping with money from our family farm, our sustainable forestry and the help of customers who are buying CSA Pre-Buys of our pastured pork. Concrete gets hard to pour in the snows and deep freeze of winter so our goal is to raise $30,000 more to close in the building before winter hits. Once we’re closed in we can continue working inside through the cold season.
A bit of reassurance: no, I have not gone over to the dark side by building a USDA/State inspected meat processing facility for our farm. I was actually doing research for regulatory information on this project many years ago when I found out about the USDA’s proposed National Animal Identification System (NAIS) via documents I dug up in their online files. I’m still solidly against NAIS, S.510 and all those sorts of things. I don’t like some of the aspects of how they apply Big Ag rules to small processors but I must deal with them to get our pork to the customer’s fork.
Keep up the good fight to prevent NAIS and it’s ilk in any of their various disguises from sneaking their way into our lives. If we ever want to see how bad it can be, all we need to do is look across the pond at DEFRA in England.
