By Pete Kennedy
Access to slaughterhouses has been poor for small livestock producers in most of the country for many years now but has become considerably worse since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. USDA-inspected slaughterhouses have since last spring been booking customers as far out as 2022. Many custom slaughterhouses are now booking well into 2021.
Demand for locally raised meat is only going to increase. At a recent food safety conference, a high ranking official from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that the department was working to have low-dose ionizing radiation, known as irradiation, to be considered as a “processing aid”a which means there would be no labeling requirement to inform consumers that meat or poultry they were purchasing had been irradiated.
