Meat infrastructure grants can make dreams, help N.H. industry lift off
May 6—CONCORD — Mark Boyden said his dream is to bring his North Haverhill meat packing operation out on the other side of a devastating COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain woes to become the second largest slaughterhouse in New England.
The vision starts with a $200,000 federal grant the Executive Council approved for Boyden's Montshire Packing LLC to buy equipment that one day should help him triple the number of heads of beef that come through his processing plant.
"The pieces of this puzzle are already in place for great growth," Boyden wrote in his pitch for the grant. "This will make the foundation for eventually processing a higher volume of value-added products for our retail and food service customers and expand our reach through new wholesale and distribution channels."
At the other end of the animal processing spectrum is Leanne Miner, who runs the one-person, Flying M Farm LLC business out of her Fremont barn that shows small farmers and homesteaders how to process poultry.
"We call ourselves bird nerds," she said.
Flying M Farm's $17,765 grant will help her create a dedicated staging area for animal drop-offs and a walk-in cooler with space to store small animal meat after processing.
"As I build my customer base and efficiencies, I hope to create a business model that adds more value for me and my customers while alleviating some of the one-off stress at local slaughterhouses," Miner said.
Agriculture Commissioner Shawn Jasper said the $750,000 in meat processing infrastructure grants to eight New Hampshire businesses is a "good start," but this industry still has a long road to travel all the way back from the depths of a pandemic that shuttered some of America's biggest meat slaughterhouses in April 2020.
"It's going to alleviate quite a bit, a good start," said Jasper, adding that he's pressing the Governor's Office for Emergency Relief and Recovery (GOFERR) to see if any additional, unspent, COVID-19 relief dollars can be deployed to this effort.
"We can do much more than this with more resources," he said.
The other awarded grants went to:
—East Conway Beef & Pork of Center Conway, equipment upgrade: $198,550;
—Granite State Packing Inc. of Claremont, roll stock packaging line, $200,000;
—New England Wagyu of Center Barnstead, freezer and cooler expansion at The Local Butcher Processing, $59,473;
—Joyce Brady of Columbia, improved efficiency at The MeatHouse, $51,877;
—Telllman Hill Farm LLC of Whitefield, poultry processing equipment, $13,835 and,
—The Horizon Farm LLC of Bennington, upgrade at Stone Barn Butcher, $8,500.
Boyden believes this assistance will help him secure a follow-up meat production grant from the Biden administration.
The Business Finance Authority and Northern New Hampshire Economic Development Council have already supplied essential aid to his operation, he said.
"New Hampshire doesn't mess around. They really have a business friendly system, and they are all about results," said Boyden, whose daughter won a seat in the Vermont Legislature last fall.
'Grass fed with a trademark'
He has seen the mountaintop and the abyss of this tough business like on Dec. 14, 2021, when he learned the Lyndonville, Vermont, slaughterhouse that had been cutting all the cows he brought in had totally shut him off without notice.
During COVID, Boyden remembers near the start of the pandemic the same butcher shop got so overwhelmed it sent him volumes of packaged ground beef that was extremely overheated.
"The fact we haven't lost our customers shows we have a good brand," Boyden said.
Last November, he bought a popular family farm and the North Haverhill property where he now turns 200 head into the MontShire Farm brand beef that meets USDA standards and has the grass-fed quality many consumers want.
"Some grass fed can be tough, gamey and chewy, but we really fatten them up and get that marbling flavor by giving them flax feed, which gets those Omega 3 levels high enough," Boyden said.
"It's grass fed but with our trademark. We're making a big push with restaurants as we speak."
Everything about being big in beef processing means big money.
The state-of-the-art gutting station Boyden will install costs $107,000, the "dip tank" to put animals into thick plastic for longer-term storage is $52,000 and the "bricker" that takes globs of ground beef and appropriately molds it into a brick shape is $55,000.
With follow-up grants, Jasper would like to create a continuing education program to train meat cutters perhaps with a mobile program that can go right to the slaughterhouse site.
Education is a goal
"It's a great idea," Boyden said. "These are good jobs. Nobody is going to get rich, but our goal is to assure everyone that they can make a pretty damn good living at it."
Miner said she offers one rate to process the poultry herself and a different rate if the small farmer wants to learn the skill from her.
"We're happy to show them how the processing is done in the event they want to do it themselves in the future," she said.
Smaller operations like Flying M Farm play an essential role in the supply chain, Boyden said.
Larger processors cannot always take a farmer's single order to cut up a cow or chicken, especially during the seasonal crunch.
"Everyone wants their meat cut from October through December. We can't possibly deliver on a single order as efficiently as the smaller processors can," Boyden said. "We badly need them to be part of the mix so all customers can be served."
