Poultry in Motion: All About Mobile Poultry Processing Units

Any of us who travel on highways are accustomed to seeing trucks, loaded with pigs or chickens or sometimes cows, on their way to slaughter. The pigs are often pressed up against the metal walls, their plump pink bodies bulging out through the air holes. Chickens are beak to cheek, feathers flying. Cows are, well, cows. It doesn’t look pleasant for any of the animals involved, and one day in the early aughts, I decided I couldn’t stomach it anymore. Literally. 

My vegetarianism lasted about four years, during which I became slightly anemic. And hungry. Blame my lackadaisical approach, sure, but I wanted meat —  meat, however, without the cruelty. I wanted meat that came from animals who had lived a good life, however short. 

Alice Berlow is that rare person I can talk to about this. (By the way, if that name sounds familiar, it’s because as Ali Berlow, she was the longtime editor of Edible Vineyard.) She doesn’t accuse me of hypocrisy. Or anthropomorphism. Or privilege. Instead, she talks easily and earnestly about things like humane slaughter, because it matters to her, too. It matters so much, in fact, that she spearheaded a coalition dedicated to delivering that option to chicken farmers and homesteaders on the Vineyard.  

But it wasn’t just the chickens that concerned Alice. She also cared about the farmers raising those chickens. She wanted to help the farm community that wishedto put those chickens onto the plates of Islanders, which, of course, means she also cared about the eaters. She wanted to provide a service that would ensure that chickens were handled locally, safely, humanely, and profitably. 

And so, around 2010, while Alice was at Island Grown Initiative (IGI), which she helped found, she set out to make this happen. 

At the time, she says, there was an existing “underground” meat processing system already at work. “I'm going to call it underground,” she says. “You know, meat processing, animal processing outside of the system has always happened.” Alice’s philosophy — and that of IGI — was to work within the system, with appropriate regulations. 

Because “that's where real, systemic change can happen,” she says, and also where the greatest economic potential and growth is available to farmers. But as Alice and her collaborators, including local farmers Richard Andre and Matthew Dix, among others, explored the regulatory landscape, the issue of humane slaughter kept rearing its head. “One of the things that we consistently heard [about] was access to humane slaughter,” Alice recalls, something she said Islanders had wanted for a long time. “We weren't the only group to try to solve that problem or barrier.” But as regulations related to slaughterhouses and access to slaughter had changed with the growing consolidation of the meat industry, Alice says access to humane slaughter became more and more prohibitive to small family farmers, especially on an island, where transport is always a challenge.

But Alice and the others learned that, while Massachusetts had clear rules around the slaughter of four-legged animals — it had to be conducted in a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)-approved slaughter house — the federal laws contained an exception for poultry. And they further learned that, while some states filled in that gap with state laws prohibiting the slaughter of poultry except in USDA slaughter houses, Massachusetts wasn’t one of them. In other words, there was a hole in Massachusetts law, perhaps big enough to drive a mobile chicken processing trailer through. 

But while all this was happening in the late aughts — and it’s possible now to take for granted the robust farm community and poultry processing production of the Vineyard — there was also a cultural shift underway.

“There was a movement going around,” Richard Andre explains, referring to the revitalization of small farms — a pushback against the previous many decades  of industrialized agriculture, which had brought us to an era of widespread factory farming and slaughter houses that, while they might have met the letter of the law in terms of human health and safety, didn’t account for the health or wellbeing of the animals themselves. 

“The industrialization of our meat system also meant that there was an industrialization and scaling up of slaughterhouses,” Alice adds, “which basically made it very difficult, if not impossible, for small family farmers to get a spot.” What’s more, while Alice says she understands those who are uncomfortable talking about slaughter — “it’s not everybody’s cup of tea” —  she believes in a system that ensures that the process is as calm, respectful, and conscientious as possible.  

The patron saint of this growing small farm movement was a Virginian named Joel Salatin, who was urging small farmers to take back control of their food. (He wrote a book called Everything I Do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front, which you can find on Amazon. Alice reached out to this self-described “preacher-farmer,” invited him to the Vineyard, and shared with him the community’s dream of processing chickens locally. “He was a bit of a rebel,” Richard says, “He said, ‘Just do it. Raise the chickens. Make them stop you. This is about your rights.’”

His words landed on fertile ground. 

Although Massachusetts allowed for the slaughter of poultry outside of USDA-approved facilities, the state Department of Public Health was saying nope. Inspired by Salatin, Alice, Richard, and the others heard that nope as maybe. Let’s try. As Richard points out, “Technically, we were allowed to do this.”

So Alice and Richard returned to the folks at the state Department of Public Health and Department of Agriculture and said something along the lines of “Listen, we understand you’re saying no, but we’re telling you we’re going to do this. … How do we get [you] to yes?” Richard admits it wasn’t perhaps that polite. “There was an element of anarchy,” he confesses. A bit of “we’re going to do this regardless; try to stop us.” 

There was, he says, “a lot of arm wrestling and cajoling,” but eventually the coalition got the boards of health (both state and local) and the Department of Agriculture to agree to a pilot program where they would allow a mobile poultry processing unit, henceforth known as the MPPU. The pilot program would operate on the Vineyard and in another Massachusetts community that had been pushing for a similar program — Belchertown in the state’s Pioneer Valley. “So that,” Richard says, “was a huge breakthrough.” 

IGI received a licence to operate the unit. The trailer would travel from farm to farm and enable poultry farmers to process their chickens and — this part is key, of course, says Richard — sell them to the public. 

Then, Alice says, “we invited all the boards of health to a demonstration at the Grange. And we set up tents and stuff, and we had the mobile processing unit ready.” She had donuts and coffee for everyone, and though she can’t recall which farmers came, some did, with their birds. “God bless them, they came,” she says, acknowledging again that witnessing slaughter isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. But transparency was important. And, of course, she says, everybody was committed to the same main goal, which was a safe process. But also a local process that was both economically viable for the farmers and free from the stress of transport on both the animals and the farmers.

“And then we were off and running,” Richard says. 

Well, maybe not quite. There were some hiccups, Alice says. For instance, part of the slaughter process is dunking the just-killed birds into cold water. And that water, which would then contain biological bits and pieces of the bird, needs to be disposed of away from any ponds or streams that could be contaminated by the process. “But we still had water going into the ground,” Alice says. She was concerned about it. Regulators were concerned about it. 

So she took her quandary to Josh Scott, a landscaper in Chilmark who was also raising birds. Josh had an idea. He suggested using wood chips to filter out the waste from the water; afterward, they could compost the wood chips.  “The perfect solution,” Alice says. That process became part of the standard protocol for any farm using the unit. 

But they also needed someone to perform the slaughter, as well as train other farmers to do it. Enter newcomer to the Island, Taz Armstrong. “I had just moved to the Island, and I was very poor,” Taz says. “There was a need, and I was desperate for work, so …” 

Turns out that Taz was uniquely suited to the job. “Not necessarily the killing aspect,” he says, “but being able to assist in providing this service to the community felt very important.” 

The procedure is pretty straightforward, he tells me, noting that he’s gesticulating “wildly” while speaking with me over the phone. He describes the process in detail — carotid arteries, 140°F scalders, rubber-finger pluckers, the whole operation. The chicken dies quickly, he says, and, therefore “more humanely.” He corrects himself. “I hate that word when it comes to killing. It’s killing. It’s not humane, but it’s more conscientious.” 

Taz reiterates what both Alice and Richard have said: that Island farmers and homesteaders who’ve raised the birds care about this. It matters to them that the birds not suffer.

“As long as everything goes properly,” Taz says, and he makes it a point to ensure that it does, “it’s a very quick process.” Specifically? “About 15 to 30 seconds,” he says. 

So there was Taz, a newcomer, traveling the Island performing a task that many didn’t want to perform but nonetheless wanted performed safely, within regulations, and without animal suffering. 

“We went to farms all over the Island,” Taz says. “We also went to a lot of backyard growers. People who just want to raise 20 birds for their families every year can use the unit as well. It was just a really great way to introduce myself to the Island, and also be introduced to the Island.” 

It’s hard to overstate the MPPU’s impact on the Island’s poultry farmers. “There was so much room for this market, for whole fresh organic chickens,” Richard says. Each bird was selling for $30, which, says Richard, seemed like a lot until people tasted it. There was such demand from consumers, he says, that it was “like storming an open door.” Within two years, the Island was raising, processing, and selling 9,000 birds, about 2,000 of which came from Richard’s own Cleveland Farm. 

Just after COVID, IGI passed off oversight of the MPPU to the Ag Society, noting that it more closely fit into the Ag Society’s mission of supporting farmers. And with that change, the folks there realized that the way the system was operating needed correction. Rather than having someone like Taz processing the birds, regulations required each farm to be licensed to operate it themselves. Taz’s role shifted to trainer, and the Ag Society began getting individual farms licensed. 

Today, half a dozen farms are certified, with more in the pipeline. Homesteaders raising their chickens for their own families don’t require a license.

“It really makes it a viable business option,” says Anna Swanson, Operations Manager with the Ag Society. “It's enabled economic viability for raising poultry in a regenerative way on the Island.” She notes the regenerative benefits of pasture-raised poultry, which help cycle nutrients and improve soil. The MPPU also eliminates the carbon emissions of travel off-Island. “We're one of maybe two [communities] in the whole state that have this, and I think we're very lucky to be able to provide [this service] to the farming community,” Anna says. “It’s pretty unique.” 

And it keeps the local food system closed-loop. “Our food is the food that is grown and raised on farms then can be processed and bought and eaten on-Island,” Anna says. “Chickens play an important role in a regenerative system – their poop creates fertilizer.”

Something interesting happens when you talk to anyone involved in this undertaking, regardless of when they joined the effort: each person insists that you must speak with others, listing names and insisting that this and that person was instrumental in the longtime and current success of the MPPU. It harkens back to something that Richard Andre said when describing the cultural backdrop of the local food movement and Joel Salatin’s visit to the Island. Following Salatin’s prodding of farmers to just get on with it, someone wondered aloud whether raising and processing more birds might saturate the market. The Island, after all, has a small year-round population — farmers might feel competitive toward each other. But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, there was collaboration, there was mutual support. And the success of each fed into the success of the overall community. 

Alice sums it up, speaking specifically of the unit, but her words also apply to the community: “It took many people, voices, and,” she says, “much effort.”

Nantucket Aims to Mimic the Vineyard’s Chicken Run

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.”