My whole family works here. Mom is doing clerical stuff. Dad runs everything. I’m managing the plant, twentyfive employees, six on the slaughter floor. I have been here off and on since I was thirteen. I started on the cleanup crew after school. During college, I didn’t think this was what I really wanted to do. After we started working with Heritage, I got excited about coming back into the business. We got a call from Heritage Foods about becoming USDA-inspected. There’s only about twenty other USDAinspected plants in Missouri. We started off doing ten or so pigs for Heritage but now we’re their primary processor. I couldn’t even begin to count how many specialty cuts we do for Heritage off the top of my head. We slaughter on Monday, Tuesday, process Wednesday and Thursday and everything ships out on Friday morning. It gets to the chefs about seven days from slaughter. They sell to Chez Panisse, Daniel Boulud, Edwards Hams, and Armandino Batali—Mario Batali’s father. Heritage changed the face of where we were headed by a long shot. We had Animal Welfare and Certified Humane up here and we've been approved by both of them. There's a lot to be said for treating the animals well prior to slaughter, both for the quality of the meat, and a simple respect for the animals that we’re using to sustain our own health. You have to make sure you're not stressing the animals with loud noises or physical abuse. Hogs and cattle are very, very stubborn animals, so if they’re in an area that they're not used to, they don’t want to move. That’s where a lot of the larger slaughter houses can lessen the quality of the meat by pushing those animals through roughly or giving them hot shots. Also, it’s important to make sure that the animals aren’t overheated. We provide feed and water and comfortable spacious areas before they go into slaughter. When you pack fifty animals into a pen meant for thirty, they get stressed out. When an animal gets stressed, it releases toxins into the muscles; the acidity level rises while the pH balance drops, and it will start to lose moisture content and get tough. We built new pens. We clean them twice a week and put misting fans inside for the summertime. It will get over 103°F. When I run that fan, it’s usually about twenty to thirty degrees cooler in these pens than it is outside. Hogs don’t sweat, they cool themselves by panting, like dogs. If they get overheated they can asphyxiate. All the breeds have their distinguishing characteristics. DuRocs are leaner pigs with a bigger muscle structure, more meat in the bellies, which makes great bacon. The red wattles are exceptionally fat, creating extremely flavorful pork that many chefs prefer. A lot of chefs also like to use the thick back for curing and cooking. Berkshire is—I hate to call it a middle-of-the-road breed, but it doesn’t have extreme characteristics. It's a good balance of fat content and meat content. If I did only white-haired hogs every week, I could probably go up another twenty to twenty-five percent on the number of hogs that we do every week. It just takes that much extra work to do the black- and red-haired hogs because there’s so much to scrape and you can’t miss any. We're getting ready for an expansion. We're going to build out almost to the end of the parking lot, adding another 23,000 square feet. It's exciting and scary. We're trying to develop more wholesale markets in the Kansas City area and all of the Midwest. Organic feed and natural feed cost more than commercial feed. So, farmers need a premium price and it's worth it. But not a lot of them know how to market it well enough to get that premium. We can help them with that. There are a lot of people my age who went away to college or culinary school and have moved back to the Midwest ready to start sustainable natural restaurants, supporting local products. Finally, people are starting to realize that naturally raised animals taste better. The food movement is coming to the Midwest.
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