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Farms seek to process and sell chicken locally with Mobile Poultry Processing Units, looking toward the other island for inspiration.
Read the full story about Mobile Poultry Processing Units on Martha’s Vineyard here.
Promising an “any-length saga” of Nantucket’s efforts to launch its own Mobile Poultry Processing Unit that we’d be interested in, Posie Constable, Managing Director of Sustainable Nantucket, brings us up to speed — quickly. (One gets the sense she doesn’t move slowly.)
Nantucket found itself grappling with a similar dilemma to that on the Vineyard: How do we create food security on the island? How can we support a somewhat isolated farm community? Or, as Posie puts it, “How do we grow more food on the island and make that food more readily and widely available, and what are the things that we don't have enough of?” Answering herself, she says, “We don't have enough of anything.”
While her group put into motion plans and supplies to help homesteaders and small farmers grow more food, one food group that remained undersupplied, she says, was protein. Supplying chicken coops helped solve part of the problem. But when it came to getting those chickens onto menus and plates, Nantucket needed what the Vineyard had — a local unit that would slaughter the birds. She and others visited the Vineyard to meet with the folks involved with the MPPU and to witness the process. And then, with a group of four keen students from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute who take on an island project each year, the Nantucket crew drafted a plan to get the town and the health department on board. The Community Foundation for Nantucket secured a Community Development Block Grant to buy the equipment.
But then Posie hit a roadblock — farmers didn’t want the unit on their property. Plus, there are distance requirements from wells and wetlands. The state health department suggested a neutral site, “a place where we could just set up our equipment and have everybody bring their birds, not all at the same time, but schedule slots wherein they could bring their birds to slaughter as a service, not for profit,” Posie explains. While multiple public and private sites were considered, Sustainable Nantucket hopes to use its farm composting field as the initial venue for slaughter training by Taz Armstrong, to be overseen by the Town's Board of Health and the state Department of Public Health. The group is seeking additional farm sites as interest in raising meat birds grows.
Posie is undaunted by the challenges and predicts that the unit will be operational this summer. After all, she says, “Hope springs eternal.”
