Have Wheels, Will Travel - Mobile abattoir makes Yukon house calls

By Julie Stauffer, Small Farm Canada

Canada’s first mobile abattoir hit the road last fall, courtesy of the Yukon government, which bought it and will subsidize its operations for the first five years. The $175,000 facility handles pork, beef, farmed elk and bison, sheep, and goats.

When we called operator Art Lock in Whitehorse this spring, the abattoir was hooked onto his truck, ready for the first job of the season.

Q: What’s the idea behind having a mobile abattoir?
A: We can go to the farm, rather than moving the animals—less stress on the animals. You just go there and do your thing.

Q: Can you describe it?
A: It’s 32 feet long. It’s got everything in it: its own power plant, a walk-in cooler, a killing floor, and a mechanical room with water tanks and everything.

Q: Has it been operating smoothly?
A: Normally it operates pretty good. It was supposed to be built for 25 to 30 below, which the back half is—the killing floor and the cooler—but the front mechanical part wasn’t and my water was freezing up. We changed the pump and we insulated more of it.

Q: So how busy has it been?
A: I did seven jobs last year. We got it late, and by then it was freezing up and we were having too much trouble getting it unthawed and everything else.

Q: How big a geographical area do you cover?
A: All of the Yukon, if somebody wants to pay to have it done. Normally we only get about 50 or 60 miles out of town. There are some farmers that are 300 miles away, but for them it would cost way too much money unless they had enough work to do for a week or ten days, but nobody up here does.

Q: How do you charge the farmers?
A: So much in mileage to get it there. Then I think beef is $100 an animal, pigs are $40, bison are $120. If they’re over 30 months of age, I charge extra, because there’s quite a bit more work to do because of diseases, spinal cord, and all this.

Q: What sort of feedback have you had from farmers?
A: It’s been good. None of them like the price, but it don’t matter where you go—if you ship the animals out, it’s going to cost more.

Q: Part of the idea behind this was to increase the amount of local meat that’s available in the Yukon.
A: Right. It was to maybe get the stores to start buying it, rather than just farm gating it. That hasn’t happened yet, because nobody up here has enough animals to supply a store steady. So the stores don’t want to break their contracts with their old suppliers. There is a couple of butcher shops that are buying it, and they just put it on their counter.

Q: How do you see this evolving over the next few years?
A: Well, I think getting busier. Actually I ordered another one—just a straight cooler trailer because this one only holds ten, and when I’ve got it full, what do I do with them? Because there is no cooler space up here.

Now that we’ve got this, the producers are all talking about having more animals. But it’s going to take a couple of years before they get set up where they can actually do it.

 

The Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada (OACC) wishes to thank Small Farm Canada for permission to reproduce this article on our website.

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Posted July 2007