Connor Barnes and his custom-made truck offer an alternative to the dangers of giant slaughterhouses
To most people, the practice of butchering livestock on-site at a farm may seem antiquated, a rustic notion from a pre-industrial past before the advent of the industrial meatpacking with its giant factories, merciless machinery and rows of assembly line workers.
Not for Connor Barnes, who brings his butchering craft straight to the farmer via a custom-made box truck out of which, on an average day, he is able to slaughter up to 6 cows or 10 pigs.
For small-time livestock farmers his business, New England Mobile Slaughter is a relief. It means they no longer have to load their livestock into a trailer, drop them off at the nearest processing plant and pick the meat up once the job is done.
Unlike commercial slaughterhouses where U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspectors are stationed on-site, Barnes operates through custom-exempt laws—a form of slaughter that doesn’t require a federal or state inspector to oversee the slaughter process. The catch is that custom-exempt slaughtered meat can only be legally consumed by the owner of the animal and cannot be sold, donated or otherwise enter the stream of commerce. However, one loophole with custom-exempt is that an animal can have multiple owners. Farmers might sell shares in a single cow prior to slaughter and then split the meat between the three or four owners.
USDA and state-inspected slaughterhouses are required to keep detailed records to aid in locating the source of any potential food-borne illness outbreak. Because Barnes operates through custom-exempt, no law requires him to keep records of the animals he slaughters. But, he keeps records anyways. “I keep my records as if there were regulations and a lot of it is people’s addresses and phone numbers and the age of the animal,” he says.
On-farm slaughter is about more than convenience for the farmer. Barnes says the practice is also more humane than what takes place in large slaughterhouses, which he describes as “dungeons.” The farmer is often with Barnes during the slaughter process and serves as an unofficial inspector to ensure their animal is treated humanely.
In recent years, independent meat processors like Barnes have tried to carve out a niche market in an industry that has faced rampant consolidation in the United States for more than half-century. In 1967, there were about 10,000 slaughter facilities in the country; by 2010, less than 3,000 remained. In 2023, the 11 largest slaughterhouses accounted for 46% of all cattle slaughtered in the U.S., while the largest 10 hog packers processed nine out of 10 hogs. Today, three multinational companies, Tyson Foods, JBS and Cargill, dominate all three major meat sectors—beef, pork and poultry.
Yet even the largest processors have vulnerabilities. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, meat supply chains were among the most disrupted sectors. Across the country, large processors were forced to scale back production or temporarily close as the coronavirus spread through the workforce, resulting in at least 269 deaths among meat workers by February 2021.
In many states, this spurred demand for locally-produced meat. As the availability of slaughterhouse spots decreased, some farmers were forced to find a way to cover the cost of feeding and housing excess animals or kill them instead.
Building a slaughterhouse from scratch comes with myriad challenges. It’s expensive and requires specialized plumbing. Small processors also face proportionally higher operating expenses than the industry giants. Large meatpackers often already own the pigs and chickens they slaughter, and because they own other stages of the supply chain through vertical integration, they can control the marketplace to keep their expenses low. This also means they dominate contracts with retailers and grocery stores.
In 2022, the Biden administration attempted to combat consolidation in the meatpacking industry with its Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program (MPPEP), which awarded more than $325 million dollars in grants via the American Rescue Plan and the USDA’s Rural Development program to 74 producers to build new slaughterhouses and expand existing slaughterhouse capacity. (The final grant awards were announced in September 2024.)
Slaughterhouse bottleneck continues to be a thorn in the meat industry’s side. They’re often booked months in advance, some livestock producers even pencil in slaughter dates before the livestock is even born. Small livestock producers might not adhere to such a rigid schedule. This presents an opportunity for small processors to fill.
Laws require an inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) to be stationed on site to inspect the meat, and securing an inspector from the USDA for new slaughterhouses can take over a year.
Without an inspector looking over his work, it’s up to Barnes to maintain cleanliness standards and do everything as if it were in a stationary slaughterhouse. “My uninspected truck comes out cleaner than the stuff that they’re doing in the inspected slaughterhouses,” he says.
Mobile slaughter is a relatively new concept—the first federally-inspected mobile slaughter unit was approved in 2002—some states don’t even have specific regulations for the practice.
While building out his custom box truck—which took nearly a year of work building the truck in Michigan with help from his father-in-law and bartering for welding services—Barnes floated several states as options to take his new business. The practice is common in western states like Oregon, where Barnes learned his butchering and slaughter craft. Eventually, he landed back in his home state of Connecticut.
Connecticut didn’t have any mobile slaughter units before Barnes set up shop, and the state doesn’t have specific regulations for mobile slaughter units. Barnes attempted to have a conversation with Connecticut’s Department of Agriculture. The department representatives he spoke with were unfamiliar with mobile slaughter, and told Barnes that as long as he’s abiding with custom-exempt laws, he’d be in the clear.
Since custom-exempt is less regulated than USDA or state inspected facilities, it doesn’t have the best public reputation. “The problem is now you have guys like me and the butcher shop I work with that are doing things clean and efficient and proper. But we’re technically in the same category as a dude cutting up a rotten beef carcass in his garage,” says Barnes.
But, to say USDA inspected meat processing facilities are subject to higher standards in practice would not be entirely true. Barnes says some facilities he’s previously worked at weren’t keen on following protocol. Some inspectors never left their office to inspect the floor, and he’s heard stories of an inspector who sat in his car in the parking lot all day and never stepped foot in the slaughterhouse.
Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle was famously inspired by the derelict conditions in Chicago’s Union Stock Yards meatpacking facilities, and served as a catalyst for the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. In researching for the book, Sinclair himself briefly worked in a meatpacking plant.
A century later, in 2013, the political scientist Timothy Pachirat undertook a similar hands-on approach for his book Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, for which he worked undercover in an Omaha, Nebraska, slaughterhouse for five months. While slaughterhouse conditions have certainly improved since the turn of the 20th century, it’s still a dirty business—Pachirat reported workers having systems to alert each other about approaching USDA inspectors, and efforts to eliminate cross-contamination between various slaughterhouse functions were not entirely successful.
Barnes says that eaters have “convinced themselves here that it says USDA on it so that makes it the better meat, but it clearly doesn’t because I know the places that this meat’s going through—and those animals are stressed out.”
Studies have shown that pre-slaughter stress in animals leads to lower quality meat, and extended stays in holding pens at slaughterhouses is a major contributor to animal stress.
Meat processing facilities are no stranger to scandal. Last year, a listeria outbreak led to 60 hospitalizations and 10 deaths. The culprit was liverwurst produced at a Boar’s Head plant in Jarratt, Virginia. Records released by the FSIS to CBS News through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed dozens of violations flagged by inspectors at the facility in 2023, foretelling a disaster in waiting. But the alarm bells raised by inspectors appeared to have fallen on deaf ears. Inspectors described derelict conditions inside the facility, including reports of black mold, insects throughout the site and brown water dripping from pipes.
Records released this year showed that three other Boar’s Head deli meat plants—located in New Castle, Indiana; Forrest City, Arkansas; and Peterburg, Virginia—were also cited in recent years for unsanitary conditions stemming from issues such as “unidentified slime” and “an abundance of insects.”
The Trump administration’s January purge of 17 inspector generals, who provide critical oversight of federal agencies, included Phyllis Fong, the long-serving USDA Inspector General. Fong initially resisted her termination, saying it was not lawful, and was subsequently escorted out of her office. The White House accused the fired inspectors general of being “rogue, partisan bureaucrats.” Fong had been appointed to her post by George W. Bush in 2002 and had served through two Democrat and two Republican administrations, including Trump’s first term in office.
About 15,000 USDA employees accepted buyouts as a part of the Trump administration’s efforts to cull workers from the federal payroll. Of those 15,000, 555 worked for FSIS, although it isn’t clear how many inspectors took the buyout.
FSIS has largely been spared from wholesale cuts at the federal level, but the FDA has suspended some programs, including a quality control program for testing raw milk. While Barnes says all meat sold in grocery stores and restaurants needs to be inspected, he hopes that, in the future, meat he slaughters on-farm can be sold at farmers’ markets. “That’s certainly going to help the small farmer, and the consumer,” he says.
Miles MacClure is a writer based in Chicago. Most of his writing revolves around culture, politics, and technology.
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