San Francisco Bay Area ranchers have a new $1.2 million facility in a 36-foot-long trailer to process their beef, pigs, goats and sheep.
Ranchers stretching from Santa Cruz to Mendocino counties formed a co-op to open their own processing facility after Marin Sun Farms, the only USDA-certified facility in the Bay Area, announced in 2019 it would no longer process animals for private rancher-owned labels. Vince Trotter, sustainable ag coordinator at the Marin County University of California Cooperative Extension, helped get the co-op started and told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat that the facility guarantees ranchers a place to process their meat, and there is no longer a need to share revenue with a commercial slaughterhouse.
USDA Undersecretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Jenny Lester Moffitt—a fifth-generation California rancher—visited the facility to hear about the roadblocks and what it took to establish the co-op to bring the information back to USDA to make it easier for other communities.
Adam Parks, a co-op board member and co-owner of Victorian Farmstead Meat Co. in Sebastopol, CA, said there has been interest from people in Oklahoma and North Carolina.
