Processing Problems with Sixth-Generation Farmer Carrie Edsal of Black Willow Pond Farm
The following episode is available here to listen to and also in a full written transcript.
Dana:
This is Talk Farm To Me, and I'm your host, Farm Girl, my real name is Dana, and it's great to be here with you again. I am interviewing some of the most amazing farmers from across the country to bring you true stories from the front lines of farming, where you will learn what goes into producing the food that we eat and so much more. In the United States, only about 2% of us are farmers. Talk Farm To Me has a lot of farmer listeners, shout out to each and every one of you, because farming can be a lonely job and it's nice to feel connected to other farmers and their struggles. But Talk Farm To Me is really for the other 98%, the non-farmers, the ones like you and me who want to know more, who want to know what goes into producing healthy and delicious food for your table, as well as clothes, fuel, packaging, baseballs and key parts of your everyday life.
When I say it's great to be here with you again, what I mean is that I have taken a little break from producing episodes of Talk Farm To Me. I have been combing the landscape of farmers for interesting stories and I've also been sharing stories from my own little farm. Yes, I have a farm, but I'm not a serious farmer like the ones that you'll meet here. I grew food for my family and friends and I have some donkeys and goats, chickens, ducks, and bees. I recently wrapped up a 100-episode season about my farm, it's called The Accidental Farm Podcast. It's just five minutes an episode, and when it's in an active season, it comes out Monday through Friday. It's like a farm snack with lessons from the farm that apply to life everywhere. You can find The Accidental Farm Podcast anywhere you get your pods and 100 delightful episodes with more than 50 five-star reviews are waiting for you.
And now on to the Talk Farm To Me series about serious on-purpose farmers. Today you will meet Carrie Edsall. Carrie is a sixth-generation farmer raising kids who will be the seventh. In addition to running a farm and raising a family with her husband, Carrie teaches animal science at the State University of New York, SUNY Cobleskill, where she also teaches and judges dairy cow competitions locally, nationally, and internationally. On the wall behind her desk as we talk, is a gallery of awards from her tenure at SUNY Cobleskill. Before we get into one of the big challenges that Carrie and her farm have faced recently, let's hear from Carrie about her own farm.
Carrie Edsall:
Black Willow Pond Farm, we've been running this farm for about 12 years almost, and again, I had the passion of being a rotational grazing farm, growing our animals out on pasture, but our farm, we're very much that pattern that Joel Salatin has introduced so many of us to, that we're multi-species, really, really focused on good pastures and giving the animals a great life out there.
Dana:
Joel Salatin is a pioneering farmer in Swoope, Virginia, who has championed multi-species rotational grazing in order to give the animals the best life and the land on the farm the most nutrients in a natural way. I interviewed Joel for Talk Farm To Me about food security early in the pandemic. You can find the conversation with him at episode nine and I will put a link to it in the show notes for this episode.
Carrie Edsall:
The property I purchased was 40 acres. It was not a farm, it was a ranch house and a barn that I made work. It wasn't my picturesque farm that I thought I would purchase, but it worked well. And with that, we have a brooder barn and we start our chicks as day old, we grow about 2,500 meat birds a year in groups. So we start, usually the chicks are in the brooder barn mid to late March, out on pasture four weeks later, depending on New York snow. And then we're harvesting our first group Memorial Weekend, and that just starts the pattern. So every four weeks we're getting new chicks in and some leave the brooder barn, some leave to go from the brooder barn to the pasture, and some are leaving from the pasture to the processor. The poultry was my main thing for many, many years, but I quickly found I needed a ruminant to graze in front of these chickens. So in the beginning, the first season I had my dad's heifers, we would bring some heifers down to graze in front of me and they were rotationally grazed.
Dana:
Just real quick, I wanted to let you know that a heifer is a female cow that hasn't had a baby yet.
Carrie Edsall:
Then I gave them back to my dad and then I realized, well wait a minute, I just did a lot of work there. So in came Katahdin Hair Sheep. We run about anywhere from just shy of 100 to about 120 Katahdin Hair Sheep, and those are the primary grazers for the farm, so we need them to make the whole farm work.
Dana:
Some lamb farmers in the northeast use Katahdin Hair Sheep because they have hair and not wool, and so they don't have to worry about shearing their sheep in addition to raising them for meat.
Carrie Edsall:
They do the grazing with poultry following behind. And then behind the meat chickens is our egg-laying hens and we have our egg mobile and run about 150-ish hens year round. And then we raise pasture-raised hogs. I buy them in as piglets. We do not have a place to farrow.
Dana:
Farrow is a word for birthing pigs. It can also mean a litter of piglets, but it is exclusively used for pigs and no other animals.
Carrie Edsall:
We buy in piglets in late winter, we'll start with some groups and we'll raise 30 to 40 at some years. So on pasture, in groups again. And because I've always grown up with meat rabbits, I continue meat rabbits and they are indoors. We do turkeys as well. So turkeys, we stick around 100 fresh for the Thanksgiving season, and those are in their Turkey taxi out there on the pasture as well. That's basically what Black Willow Pond Farm does.
Dana:
Just like sustainable farming pioneer, Joel Salatin, preaches, Black Willow Pond Farm raises pigs and sheep and poultry, and cows for beef and milk. So of course they need a place to sell their products and Carrie is always looking for a way to diversify.
Carrie Edsall:
We retail all of our meats at a few different farmer's markets and we're year-round in Cooperstown, which is a really great market with a great following there.
Dana:
The Cooperstown Farmers Market is a three-minute walk from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It's open on Saturdays year-round, has an indoor facility and 30 producers and artisans from a 50-mile radius.
Carrie Edsall:
And we have a lot of local customers who come to the farm directly to purchase. So they were asking for milk and I had milk, but raw milk, you can't sell off the farm, and the two farms are eight miles apart, so we're not too far away, but it's a lot of back and forth. So long story short, we found a connection to help us bottle milk, and then last December, we started to partner with a local small creamery, a goat creamery actually, to begin bottling milk from our generational dairy farm. A way we're running with that now to bottling milk, doing cheese curd, yogurt, and really we found another customer base too with that. So it's been a good way of trying to get people to shop local and really come to one farm.
Dana:
Let's talk about processing your animals, all of your different harvest times. Obviously your chickens are happening throughout the summer and continuing, but you ran into pretty serious issues recently with regards to slaughtering your pigs, so I just want to understand what the schedule looks like and what happened.
Before I let Carrie answer this question, I just wanted to tell you what processing means. It involves slaughtering the animals, cutting the meat, inspecting it to ensure that it's safe to eat, packaging it, making it into other products like maybe sausage or lunch meat. But when we're talking about processing, it's the whole thing.
Carrie Edsall:
I've always considered us very fortunate to have an array of processors within a couple of hours, because I know people across the country who do not have those options, they're driving five or six hours for a processor. And we're very fortunate to have an array of USDA and New York custom harvesters in a very short distance.
Dana:
USDA-inspected slaughter plants have a grant of inspection and an inspector that stands over the slaughter process. The meat that is processed there can be sold anywhere in the United States, but in New York State there are custom processors and these facilities have an exemption from federal inspection but require state-issued licenses to slaughter or process animals, they can only be sold within the state. This is really important to know.
Carrie Edsall:
So I've always considered us so lucky for that. I'd like to say I'm a pretty good scheduler with our red meats, which must go USDA in order for us to sell them at the farmer's markets. Red meats got a little challenging during the COVID time when everybody was grabbing those spots. So a year and a half ago it was like normal spots that would maybe be a little more flexible in the spring for heavier lambs I had or things like that, those were gone and then the fall spots were quickly gone too. And we've always, here in New York, most people have the pattern of fall harvest, so we're used to that schedule being more crowded and knowing that you need to plan well in advance. And COVID taught me even different of planning and COVID also taught me that I need to not depend on just one or two processors, so I'm very thankful for that forethought I had that we started meeting other processors and getting on their wait lists and they were generous to call me if they had an opening.
So I met a few new processors over the time of the last year and a half and made my, do I like them, do I not, what do I think is good and so on. But those processors were much farther away. We had worked with a fairly local processor for a long time, less than 45 minutes away, and I had booked with them for years, years and years, and my fall with them was always very well planned. And I had booked over a year ago for my fall dates and therefore because we don't farrow, I have to purchase in pigs based on the dates that I have, which makes another juggling act that can be challenging. With our lambs, we're planning those ahead of time as well, when we think we'll have enough ready, based on when they're lambing. Up at the dairy farm, we're also doing some beef cattle up there and veal calves, so I have to plan veal calves. I usually do them in groups of two to four and the same with our steers, the Angus that we're raising.
So it's a well-planned out machine I'd like to say, and very recently, and without forewarning or any communication, the local processing center was sold. I was told that the plan was business as usual, and there was very little communication with the processor that we felt we had known for a long time. So we had some pigs that were scheduled for processing, and again, I went with business as usual. These were actually my kids 4-H pigs, so it was a group of four. And we drove those pigs up to the processor. I was looking forward going in with a positive attitude that hey, new management could be good. I didn't want to go in very negative. So I went in to meet them, I brought all of my paperwork, we had our cut sheets all lined up because the pigs were sold.
Dana:
Maybe you've never thought about a cut sheet before, but a farmer really needs to think about that and to know animal anatomy, like how thick do they want the cuts, what do the customers want and how do you want it to be done, for pigs, for example, hams and bacon, shoulders and loins and ribs, for farmers who want to use 100% of the animal they have raised and to get the most out of it at market.
Carrie Edsall:
And I go in and we are told we're not able to process your pigs, literally as the pigs are on the trailer. The reason being is that the new management is Muslim and their choice is to not do the slaughter of the pigs.
Dana:
Just a word here on the basic rules of a Muslim slaughterhouse, the rules are that the animal be in good health and that the slaughter be conducted in the appropriate ritual manner where the throat is cut by a sharp knife severing the carotid artery, the jugular, and the windpipe in a single swipe, the animal must bleed out completely as Muslims do not eat blood or the flesh of swine or any animal killed in a different method.
Carrie Edsall:
So because management of the crew cutting the animals was the same, they just needed to find someone to do the kill portion of it. And I was told it was going to happen in one method and in the end there was no method to be had. And they basically told us we had to come back up and get our pigs, after we left them there.
Dana:
So they said that they wouldn't kill the pigs, but they would cut the pigs?
Carrie Edsall: Yes.
Dana:
And they said they would kill them or they would get someone else to kill them?
Carrie Edsall:
They would get someone else, yes. So I was very upset the day we arrived there, and again, business as usual to me is you're going to do pigs. We had been well booked. I was not the only one, Lord knows that, I could not have been the only one in those upcoming weeks. And again, there was no phone calls. Again, harvest of pigs in the fall is very common here in New York. So yeah, they had told me that the former owner would come in and do the kill portion and that then they would plan on cutting the pigs accordingly.
So after a little bit of waiting run around on that day we dropped off, we did decide to leave the pigs there. We put them in a pen, we made sure everything was secure and we drove off hoping for the best. And 24 hours later I'm in school and get the phone call that they have no way to kill the pigs, and you can either bring someone up to do the kill or come and get the pigs. I had to gain composure over this because now my pigs are stressed and this is not the way I raise them.
Dana:
Just a note about stress, ideally farmers like Carrie want to tax their animals very little on the farm and in their journey to slaughter. Short-term acute stress from moving animals, leaving them in a slaughter facility in unfamiliar conditions and general excitement produces lactic acid from the breakdown of glycogen resulting in meat that is tougher. Fear experienced during slaughter significantly elevates meats level of stress hormones like adrenaline, cortisol and other steroids. Just a note about stress, ideally farmers like Carrie want to tax their animals very little on the farm, as well as in their journey to slaughter. Short-term acute stress from moving animals or leaving them in a slaughter facility in unfamiliar conditions and general excitement produces lactic acid from the breakdown of glycogen resulting in meat that is tougher. Fear experienced during slaughter significantly elevates meats level of stress hormones like adrenaline, cortisol and other steroids.
Carrie Edsall:
We pride ourselves on raising them in a great setting, and now this has been a very stressful 24 hours for them. I got off the phone with him quickly and said, "I'm going to try to figure something out." I do know my custom guys could have gone up to do the kill, and I made a couple of phone calls really quick knowing that this was totally not acceptable. But again, I had these slots and quite frankly, I had no idea what I was going to do with these pigs if we brought them back home, they were finished weights, they looked great, they had to go USDA for the customers I had them sold to because it was retail and restaurants and things of that sort. So I couldn't bring them home and have my custom guy do them.
Long story short, after a quick couple of phone calls and one phone call to my husband to get on the phone with every other processor we had a relationship with, and pretty much beg if they would take them. And the people I called about doing the kill for me, they weren't comfortable with that situation. They don't know the equipment. It really wasn't fair of anyone to ask this type of a thing. I'm just calling out of desperation, you're my friend, you have this skill to do this. And then in conversation with one of them, I was like, "No, you are absolutely right. This is not what a USAD plant should be asking someone to do. My husband called back, thankfully, and we had two spots guaranteed for us, with a processor that really we had just started working with within the last year. We loved their work, we were very happy with their work, we were thrilled. So there's that again, building relationships, but it was two, but two was better than none, so we were going to figure it out.
So my husband went up to pick up those pigs and bring them back home. There was some scare with doing that too, USDA was still there, that was my other fear is that we would get there and the new owner was saying, "Come get them," but then USDA might be like, "You can't take them now." But they did, they let us remove them from the facility and we brought them home. There was some fear though, what were they exposed to up there as we're bringing them back. But we made arrangements at home for them to not be around other pigs, and we felt comfortable with it. But it was stressful and I had kept kind of quiet about hearing the sale of that facility, I didn't want to say much until I got there myself and met the people. So then after that I went to social media with our issue and I went explaining because I knew I wasn't the only one who had animals going there.
Again, they've been a mainstay in this area for over 10 years, and a lot of farm friends of mine have animals scheduled there, and I wanted to encourage them that you need to start looking elsewhere or making arrangements to make sure that they can properly harvest your animals.
Dana:
So do you take other animals there besides pigs?
Carrie Edsall:
Yes. So that was for pigs that were scheduled. I have four veal calves scheduled. We have more pigs scheduled. We have two Angus scheduled in there, and then 35 lambs scheduled and then 10 more pigs.
Dana:
With the way that Carrie schedules out the processing of animals from Black Willow Pond Farm, this processing facility stood to lose over $12,000 in business pretty immediately and more in the long term. Here's what happened.
Carrie Edsall:
I am not taking anything there, I am not. I have made the call that that is not where I want to go. I just found that it's better to cut ties completely at this point.
Dana:
So explain to me how you go about selecting a processor. You have criteria, you said that you look around and you've got a diverse selection, but what do you look for in a processor?
Carrie Edsall:
Part of it, you want to see the facilities. Are they clean, are they acceptable? They're all USDA, so there is standards that they have to hold up to. I try to keep in mind that hopefully the animal is not going to be there long, so are the pens acceptable enough? You know the kill and the processing part should be done at a high standard because it's USDA, and of course, we don't get to see that part of it. So I'm seeing the before and I'm seeing after with our product. Are they following our cut sheet and the requests that we're putting on there? I am a farmer who probably drives some processors a little batty because I put too much information on there. And because we do some animals for people for their home use, they want their cut sheet the way it is.
They're paying a premium for the way that we raise our animals. They deserve to have proper steps followed with that cut sheet. So have they done those details? And then packaging, packaging is, you can raise this animal so beautifully and then it's not packaged properly or nicely or labeled correctly. And you're looking for one-pound packages and you have 1.6 pounds, 1.4 pounds, 0.86 pounds. That variety makes it very hard for people like us who are trying to market our products as equally impressive as the store. Let's face it, everything in Walmart looks the same, the packaging is the same, the sizes are relatively the same. So when you see such variables at the small scale, yet we're asking for a premium, I mean, that can be hard to ask for people. They're paying a lot of money for this rib chop or this lamb rib chop put in front of you and the vacuum seal is not right or it's not presented where they can see the cut well.
And I have found that there is some processors who do a great job with it and other ones who don't care. And I'm being pretty blunt, but we're at their mercy. We are really at their mercy with what we have. We're trusting in them to do a good job with that final product. And sometimes we accept things that really can be a hard pill to swallow because it doesn't look up to par. You can only accept that so long, is my opinion, and that's when I start looking for new processors. You give them a chance, you try to build that relationship and are they giving you a beautiful final product or is it one that you're frustrated with, as you're trying to do inventory in your freezer? And I was starting to have that with this processor and that's why we started venturing elsewhere.
It was hard to get on their calendar, it was hard to accept the constant different package sizes and things. So we started looking. And I guess you just have to determine what's acceptable on your realm of things and what do your customers want? Our customers, they're paying a premium and I want to give them that premium product and it should look that way when they see it and when they taste it.
Dana:
So you had quite a runway of animals heading to this processor and they're not doing pigs anymore, but now you're not taking any of your animals there anymore, and so you're building relationships and scrambling. What are the financial implications for sort of an unannounced change like this?
Carrie Edsall:
From us, most of our processors in this area are pretty uniform with pricing. So the pricing that we pay for the slaughter and the price per pound a package and things like that varies minimally. Some are a little more, some a little less, but it's acceptable, is what I would say. Our time is where I cannot get back, but now we're driving farther, fuel prices are expensive and we are driving a few hours now to go to a farther processor than the one that was just up the hill.
Dana:
So all of these costs add up, your time, yeah, but the gas. The Energy Information Administration, the EIA, says that in 2022, gasoline average prices will be $3.24 cents. I just checked, and locally here, it's almost $4.50 cents a gallon, mainly from the unforeseen conflict in Ukraine. These tangential costs really add up for farmers.
Carrie Edsall:
And so now you're a few hours into the trip up with the animal and back to the farm and then you're back up to pick up the product and back down, and we just don't have that time. The balancing act is really hard with small farms when you're trying to do it all. I don't know how to charge for that. I'll be honest, I don't know how to take that back to our customers. And right now it's not their fault, those customers who have purchased whole and half, they've been quoted a price per pound for that animal and then they pay processing.
Yeah, they might pay a little more processing because it's a different processor, but I'm not going to up my price to the customer, but I now have a full day of extra driving and time into that just of the back and forth. So yeah, that's going to eat into us. Can I up our price at the retail level? Maybe, but again, we have a premium product already, so this is a lot where we kind of suck it up and I don't know, I don't know in the end, how long can we do it for? We're definitely going to hold steady this fall or where we are at this point and just try to figure out that balancing act, but it was not expected at all.
Dana:
So explain to me the difference. You're going to take your pigs to a USDA processor, the processor can't process them anymore, but you have another alternative. You can harvest these animals and sell them whole. Explain how that works and why that's acceptable.
Carrie Edsall:
So we could do the custom exempt and that's here in New York, where they are New York State certified. So there is a New York State inspector in there, it's not some backyard person. So New York State checks in on that plant, but there's not a USDA person standing over the pens to make sure that the animal is healthy and they're not watching the processing steps that go through right up to the packaging. So we do have that option, and we do have some great custom processors in this area who I've used, especially with lambs. We have a lot of people who want that whole lamb, so they'll purchase that as a "live animal," air quotes, we've agreed on the price ahead of time and then they pay for the service of the processing. So we can go that route, however, that route does not allow us to go into restaurants or to sell by the retail cut.
So that animal, those will be labeled, in New York State, they're labeled not for sale or not for retail, and they can go into your freezer. So I could fill your freezer with that option. We've arranged for a couple of pigs to go that way, but I think we're going to be okay in the end. I am very fortunate and yeah, I'm just very, very fortunate because the new processors that we've been working with did not have to take me in. They owed me nothing, but they're squeezing us in. And the way that they're squeezing me in though is not by taking my large groups of animals, it's two at a time. So it's more trips to the processor so that they can fit us in their calendars.
Dana:
So if we step back to a 35,000-foot view of small farms and processors across the country, are you hearing similar squeezes?
Carrie Edsall:
Yes. Yeah, it is so hard. And actually within the last month, there has been two other processors in, again, close enough to me that I could use. I never did use them, but I would say within a three to four-hour radius, that I have heard are no longer USDA and they chose to let go of USDA and go to the custom option.
Dana:
Why is that?
Carrie Edsall:
I've heard a few things and I hope I'm not overstepping, but one of the common parts was the mask mandates. Federal is being required to wear masks in the processing arena and they're finding that it's very uncomfortable for them. They don't need the hassle. They have enough customer base that they could go without that USDA stamp.
Dana:
This is a complicated issue everywhere and not just for political reasons. In early 2020, I'm sure you heard about all of the meat processing plants that closed and had to turn away farmers and farms with animals ready to be processed, and no place on the farms to keep them. A House of Representatives subcommittee reviewing the coronavirus pandemic found plants owned by five major meatpacking companies accounted for at least 59,000 COVID-19 cases and 269 deaths, much higher than any previous tally. What's more, according to a USDA study, through May 2020, counties with meatpacking plants saw 10 times as many cases as counties without them. Part of the complaints about wearing a mask in a processing facility is that in a small facility, the slaughter floors can see temperatures of above 90 degrees where you're working on an animal that is 101 degrees and spraying it with water that's 180 degrees. And if you have to be masked up, your mask is becoming saturated with water and other things from the kill floor.
Carrie Edsall:
So could more fall by the wayside with that? Yeah. Other ones are having a hard time, they want to retire and there's no one to follow in the footsteps or to purchase the plant, so they're closing shop with that or they're cutting back and again, letting go of USDA and all the federal regulations that come with that. So yeah, again, and I'm speaking what I can from the New York side of things, but it's an issue everywhere. Everywhere. And we watched early COVID time of that March of 2020, these animals that were scheduled for slaughter at the large-scale slaughterhouses and they couldn't be slaughtered because they had to shut down due to COVID. And us little guys had meat, so it worked great and that helped.
And I think we are a society who's used to big and box store things, but big is fragile. And when big breaks the trickle-down is really interesting to watch and it's scary. And I'd like to say society still wants to know where their meat comes from and they want to make relationships with their farmers. Without these small USDA plants, we're not going to be able to make that connection. It will have to be people changing their buying habits even more. I mean, I'm one to talk about that all the time. Coming to the farmer's markets, that's a change of buying habit. You can't get everything when you walk in that farmer's market and you have to learn who you like and you're coming on a Saturday, so that's changing your buying habits. But if we now only offer animals as a whole or half with our custom slaughterhouses, that's another big way of changing buying habits. Do you have freezer space to take a large half a steer or a whole pig? And so again, it comes back of will we lose customers because we're not offering that retail option anymore?
Dana:
What do you think the solution is going forward?
Carrie Edsall:
I don't know. I wish I had a magic wand or the magic eight-ball to tell us. The easy answer is we need more slaughterhouses. We do. But who wants that job? I think we need to figure out what the atmosphere to make it a more pleasing job and encourage people that it's a viable career because we have people who are waiting in line to get in your doors. So if we could find that way, find those people who want to open slaughterhouses, that would be great, but it is a barrier. It really is.
Dana:
To work in a slaughterhouse, the annual mean wage nationally is $31,000 a year and slightly higher in New York State where Black Willow Pond Farm is, at $32,000 a year. You can see the parallels between large-scale farming and small-scale farming, like on Carrie's farm. On the large scale, if a processor shuts down, there's a real crisis, just like on a smaller farm like hers. So much goes into the raising of the animals, their care, their health, their relatively stress-free lives, that when the processing piece of the equation jams up or doesn't work at all, it's a major problem for the farm, for the farmer, for the animals, and for the customers.
Carrie Edsall:
There's a lot that goes into it and at this small scale, it's even harder. The pieces just seem to bounce around more. We don't have contracts, we don't have guarantees of anything. And from my experience, when you schedule with a processor, that is your contract. So when it's suddenly taken away from you, it's as devastating as when big contracts are pulled out from large-scale farming. It's just not what I expected to have happen.
Dana:
I am so glad that you joined me here for this episode of Talk Farm To Me to hear from sixth-generation farmer, Carrie Edsall, about Black Willow Pond Farm and the animals she raises with such care. You have learned a little bit about the tricky business of processing meat and getting the consumers or eaters like you, a high-quality product. Crises like these pop up all the time in the world of farming, whether you run a big farm or a small one. It's good for all of us to be conscious of the issues our farmers are facing, the day-to-day ones and the more emergent ones like this. I encourage you to find and stay connected with Carrie and her farm life on Instagram, where she shares the beauty and the truth. You can find her there @BlackWillowPondFarm.
While you're there, follow along with my Accidental Farm and a new important initiative to support our farmers, @XOXOFarmGirl, and also on Talk Farm To Me where I will share some of the upcoming episodes. A rancher from Oregon whose cattle are infused with beer, some micro-farms that harvest for tinctures and for joy, as well as a maple syrup maker who harvests more than 5,000 sugar maples in the sugar bush. Lots of great episodes coming your way, so stay connected. Until next time, I am your host, Farm Girl, and this is Talk Farm To Me.