A new jewel of educational opportunity sits tucked away on the campus of Colorado State University, Fort Collins. If you don’t know what to look for, you’d miss it. But current and future ag students surely won’t.
The new JBS Global Food Innovation Center in Honor of Gary and Kay Smith is the result of two-and-a-half years of work. Despite the long name, the facility is a teaching livestock and meat processing facility, capable of taking students from live animal all the way to retail meat sales and ready-to-eat packaged foods.
Dr. Robert Delmore, professor and director of undergraduate programs for the Department of Animal Sciences, headed up the project. He explained to WLJ during a recent tour that Colorado State University, Fort Collins (CSU) had previously had a processing plant on campus, like most other land-grant universities with an animal science or meat science program.
“We had this on campus from ’59-’93 and we had a little hiatus and now we’re back.”
The new facility
The facility was announced in 2017 as a $20 million partnership between CSU and JBS USA. The 36,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility is effectively a microcosm of the processing-to-consumer side of the cattle and beef supply chain neatly packaged into an on-campus building.
The facility merges the existing animal science building with an updated common area with specialized classrooms, meat and chemistry labs, and a retail space, as well as a controlled-access, USDA-inspected processing facility including livestock handling and processing areas designed for cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, chicken, and turkeys; meat processing facilities, including ready-to-eat packaging areas; and an industrial kitchen for research and catering.
“The facility is built for teaching principles,” stressed Delmore. “It’s not a production facility. We’re not in the production business. We’re in the teaching, research, and outreach business.”
While most land-grant schools have some sort of livestock and meat processing facility, the new CSU facility has two unique features; the animal handling and processing area, and its ready-to-eat packaging area.
The indoor livestock holding pens show the mark of Dr. Temple Grandin, who was instrumental in its development. The area is well lit, the flooring has traction for hooved livestock in mind, the sides of most of the pens are solid-sided to reduce visual distractions, and curved chutes leading up to the stun boxes.
“This is what you would see in a large plant; it’s just a much, much smaller version,” Delmore explained. Both he and Grandin highlighted the importance of the flooring where livestock are held. One section had deep, diamond-shaped grooves cut into the concrete, while the other had shallower indentations, as though chain had been pressed into the curing concrete.
“They’ve done a very nice job on it and they’ve done an especially nice job on the flooring, because it’s important to show the students how to do the right flooring. That’s really important,” Grandin told WLJ in a later interview.
The other unique feature of the new CSU facility is the ready-to-eat packaging room that was built with extreme attention to food safety protocols. After meat goes through the commercial passthrough ovens and is chilled, it goes into the specialized room.
“Nothing else ever goes in here. No raw meat has ever, and will never, be in here,” Delmore explained. “This is what we do in industry, so we wanted to mimic what we do here.”
“This space is very unique to this building. There’s no other university that has this space,” Delmore added.
Opportunities for ag youth
Even though the ribbon cutting on the new facility happened only days before WLJ got to tour it, students were already utilizing every part of it.
Delmore explained that one of the base classes for Animal Science—a live animal and carcass evaluation class he called “A&EO 250”—was moved into the building as quickly as possible. The number and type of livestock processed through the facility will likely be set by the needs of that class, he said. But more classes are moving in rapidly.
“We have meat evaluation classes that are already starting in the building and we’ll start more in the fall. We’ve got a meat processing class that will be in the fall. We’ve got another variant of a meat processing class that’s in there right now. We’ve got research projects that have just started and will continue. We’ll fill it. Quick.”
He added that there is absolutely opportunity for expansion of the existing program.
“We have about 830 in our department, with two majors, animal and equine, and then there’s a subset of those students—right now it’s probably 30-40 students—that are really interested in food and meat processing. That number is ratcheting its way up because of this.”
Grandin seconded this, saying she thinks the facility will help the CSU program grow especially because students want hands-on education.
“I think it’s going to make students want to come to CSU because I think it’s going to help improve our program.”
The facility could also allow new classes to be offered, as well as new crossovers on campus and with industry in the area. Delmore gave numerous examples of potential crosspollination, such as the campus’ Hospitality Management program that used the old processing facility; the retail store that is partnered with the “Where Food Comes From” program; the ability to offer short courses, both to students, residents, and members of industry; and possibilities with culinary and catering opportunities.
“Each day we find a little more area for overlap,” he said. “The thought is, certainly we’ve got all these rooms filled, if you will, but there’s a lot more opportunity for other things going forward.” — Kerry Halladay,WLJ editor
