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Oct 14, 2024

Cambridge farmer expands into Granite State meat processing - VTDigger

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on Sept. 19. After weathering the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark Boyden found himself nearly forced out of the beef industry. The

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on Sept. 19.

After weathering the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark Boyden found himself nearly forced out of the beef industry.

The Cambridge farmer got out of the family dairy business at the turn of the century and a few years later started raising beef cattle. In the early years, he made deliveries in his own truck with the air conditioning cranked.

A couple of decades later, Boyden Beef had found its way into stores and restaurant burgers across the region. Boyden developed a good connection with Vermont slaughterhouses and meat processors by providing a dependable number of cattle throughout the year, instead of rushing them to slaughter in the high-demand season of September to January, as some other farmers tended to do.

The pandemic changed all of that.

The supply chain became severely stressed as outbreaks of the Covid virus in some of the largest meat processing plants shined an unfavorable light on the nation’s consolidated food chain. As meat became more expensive, more people began to turn to higher quality, locally raised animals, and more farmers began raising beef cattle to meet the demand.

Slaughtering is the easy and quick part, Boyden said. It’s the disassembling and packaging of the animal that takes time and skilled labor. The rise in demand placed increased pressure on Vermont’s nine meat processors, two that are inspected by the state and seven that are overseen by the federal government, according to the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont.

According to its “slaughterhouse project,” which supports the creation of more processing plants in Vermont, NOFA claimed that current processors were at “almost maximum capacity, with farmers booking slaughter spots 18 months in advance.”

Competition from an increasingly consolidated and monopolized meat production and processing sector leaves small producers like Boyden with few options.

The Brazilian-born JBS is the world’s largest processor of beef and pork, slaughtering over 76,000 cattle a day, according to the company. It rose to power in its native country through a massive bribery scheme, according to the Wall Street Journal, and a $20 billion international acquisition campaign, according to the New York Times, both of which went unopposed by the administrations of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Just before Christmas 2021, the Lyndonville meat processor that slaughtered Boyden’s cows abruptly shut its door to him after an increasingly contentious relationship and, according to Boyden, food safety issues involving how the meat was being handled.

He found a new processor two hours away from his farm, just over the border in North Haverhill, N.H. Less than a year later, the owner of the plant and adjacent farm had died.

Boyden saw an opportunity to shore up the long-term sustainability of his beef operation in an increasingly competitive and costly industry, and he took it. He dubbed his new slaughterhouse and meat processing business MontShire Farms in acknowledgement of its cross-border business, and its biggest customer was now Boyden Beef.

“I saw the opportunity here, and it was kind of a calculated risk, but that’s what you do in business,” Boyden said.

The facility Boyden was buying was just the kind the federal government and Tom Vilsack, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, were looking to support with billions of dollars in new subsidies.

“When I bought this, I knew that there was going to be a really good chance of getting grant money, because they’d already announced the grant money coming down the road,” Boyden said.

Beyond MontShire’s direct-to-market store and sales offices, a large warehouse area encases a smaller, enclosed facility where cows and pigs are first slaughtered, butchered and processed into marketable parts. Earlier this month, Boyden was discussing measurements with an employee and contractor as they prepared to triple the facility’s capacity.

This expansion is being funded by a $2.1 million local meat capacity grant, one of 33 recipients that received a chunk of the $26 million distributed through the program nationally. In its description of the grant, the USDA identified MontShire as “the largest fee-for-service processing facility” in New Hampshire and one of just three still in operation.

Currently the facility processes around 50 cows and nearly as many hogs each week, though Boyden envisions a shift exclusively toward beef as it grows, meaning MontShire could handle around 300 animals a week after its expansion.

New Hampshire’s Executive Council has also chipped in $200,000 in grant money to cover the price of some particularly costly new machines to help facilitate the expansion. According to Boyden, though, the fact of his processing plant existing just over the border has helped its success.

“I was told by the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, ‘We’re not going to give you anything at all, but we’re going to make it easy to do business,’ and I can live with that,” Boyden said. “I’m afraid, in Vermont, we have a lot of mindsets of, instead of government trying to work with business, government is there to regulate business and put the hammer down first.”

Boyden also praised the culture of New Hampshire residents, who he claimed are more focused on job creation over complaints about smell or noise. Boyden sold off some of his land and now only grows feed for his own cows after a Vermont Agency of Agriculture-approved program to apply treated human waste to his fields was met with such fierce backlash by neighbors that he swiftly ended the practice in 2021.

Boyden isn’t a fan of every aspect of living free or dying, however, and said the two states could learn from one another. He pointed to the exorbitant energy costs in the Granite State, some of the most expensive in the country, and New Hampshire’s inability to bring costs down by encouraging free market economics instead of Vermont’s more hands-on regulatory approach. More grant money will fund 240 solar panels in one of his fields will help defray that expense.

While the federal government has subsidized MontShire’s expansion, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to a processor like JBS, which has received over $900 million in government contracts and was the recipient of $67 million in bailout funds, according to the New York Times, leading food industry analyst Austin Frerick to characterize Vilsack’s new funding of small slaughterhouses to “dumping a billion dollars on Ask Jeeves and wishing the company good luck against Google.”

Still, it’s keeping Boyden in business.

“Obviously, I’m very biased, I’m a recipient, but this is an example of the government working with businesses with a vision and making it work, and not just throwing money out there,” he said.

It may be in New Hampshire, but Boyden pointed out that most of the fat-marbled carcasses hanging in the meat locker were born in Vermont and spent most of their lives grazing on its hills.

“Boyden Farm is still in Vermont, and I’ll tell you, most of the cattle we do here are from Vermont,” he said. “I’d say three quarters, if not more, of all the cattle hanging in the bunker are from Vermont.”

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Neale Lunderville, President and CEO of VGS (Vermont Gas) and Trustee of Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger

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