Imagine it as two fine cuts of beef dropped gently onto a pair of plates by the head chef.
A pair of pre-fabricated buildings were moved slowly, gently, and perfectly by crane onto foundations on L&A Cross Road in the Township of Spallumcheen, Thursday, Jan. 9. This is part of what will become an agri-hub in the township. The facility is just up the road from the planned new home of Okanagan Valley Feeds.
"Today, we are setting up our butcher hub, a modular meat processing facility that we have designed to help the meat processing capacity here in the North Okanagan," said Julia Smith, executive director and co-founder of the Small Scale Meat Producers Association (SSMPA), from Merritt. She was on-site to watch the buildings lowered into place on property the association is leasing from the township.
The organization, co-founded by Spallumcheen's Steve Meggait of Fresh Valley Farms, owns the buildings.
The facility's focus, said Smith, is on red meat. It's being set up for primarily processing beef, hogs and sheep. It's a building, she said, that's much needed in the North Okanagan.
"This is a bit of a unique area. For most of the province, it91ÂãÁÄÊÓƵ™s really difficult to even get animals slaughtered," said Smith. "In this region, there91ÂãÁÄÊÓƵ™s still some slaughter capacity. The backlog is the cut-and-wrap (of the meat). The slaughter is the quick part, and then the real work starts.
"By increasing cut-and wrap-capacity in this community, we are really going to be able to optimize the facilities we have."
She used Salmon Arm's Yankee Flats Meats as an example. The company has storefronts in the Shuswap and in downtown Vernon. The farm, she said, can slaughter animals but can't process its meat. The new facility in Spallumcheen will be able to take Yankee's carcasses and process them.
"Farms have been looking to increase meat production capacity but they haven't been able to scale their businesses, despite the increased demand for local food, local meat," said Smith. "They haven't been able to meet that demand because there haven't been enough processing facilities.
"A lot of people would like to grow their businesses but haven't been able to. Now, they can scale up their operations."
The Spallumcheen facility will run in conjunction with one of SSMPA's slaughter trailers.
Changes to meat processing regulations in B.C. now allow for increased access to on-farm slaughter.
"It's a state-of-the-art mobile slaughter trailer that goes onto a farm with a professional operator," said Smith. "They can slaughter those animals, load their carcasses into a cooler on the trailer, and bring those carcasses back to this (Spallumcheen) shop for processing."
Smith said an operator for the township facility is lined up, and meat-processing jobs will be created.
The facility hopes to be in operation in March.
Spallumcheen's RJ Fisher Transport brought the modular buildings to the site with their designers and builders, Kelowna-based Chaparral, also on site. The buildings were lowered onto their foundations by Kelowna-Merritt company Alpha Crane.
