This mobile slaughterhouse will visit farms in a six–county area. Photo By Amy Radil.

Local Farmland Preservation Makes Slow Progress

Amy Radil
07/14/2009

Efforts to preserve farmers and farmland around Puget Sound move slowly, but they are bearing fruit. Two groups recently celebrated small victories that they hope will keep local farmers on the land. And local food in markets and restaurants.

On a recent summer night, the PCC Farmland Trust held a small benefit at a donor's elegant home in Wallingford. The event's locally grown menu was meant to inspire donations to save area farmland — Washington currently loses about 23,000 acres a year to development. But the trust had some good news for its supporters that night — it had just helped purchase a 100–acre dairy farm near Orting which could have become 10 single family lots. Instead it will be an organic farm in perpetuity.

They introduced Dan Hulse, one of the new farmers on that land.

Hulse: "We signed a lease in April to get started on the land for this year and today was our first farmer's market in Puyallup."

Hulse and his wife are growing vegetables, to sell at farmers markets and through their home delivery business called Terra Organics. He says they're already making improvements at the farm. In the past they had been renting land, which made long–range planning impossible.

Hulse: "We would improvise because we knew we couldn't make that investment, that capital improvement, because it wasn't ours."

The widow who owned the Orting dairy farm heard Hulse speak about his passion for farming at a public meeting. She wanted to sell her land to him. The PCC Farmland Trust helped bring the deal together, by purchasing the development rights for the property. That cut the price by $10,000 an acre, making it much more affordable for Hulse.

Hulse: "The purchase of development rights or the transfer of development rights is the way to get the next generation of farmers on the farmland."

But even farmers who already own their land have a hard time getting by, especially those who raise livestock. For years western Washington has lacked a USDA–inspected slaughterhouse. That meant farmers couldn't legally sell cuts of beef, pork or lamb to markets and restaurants without trucking their animals to an Oregon packing house and back.

Two years ago Cheryl Oulette, a Pierce county farmer also known as "the pig lady," began the efforts to build a mobile slaughterhouse. Last month she presided over the ribbon cutting.

Oulette: "It's like two years of being pregnant and the baby is here, and I'm so excited and all of a sudden in the middle of the night last night I went, oh my God, now the real work starts."

Oulette's "new arrival" is a gleaming white tractor trailer, with a ramp that comes down in back and a large metal hook hanging from the ceiling inside. At the ribbon cutting, Mike Parish explained in vivid detail what happens after the animal is killed.

Parish: "And then as we pick it up with the winch here we have spreader bar, it picks the beef up, and then we start splitting the stomach open to bring the guts out and then the heart, liver, spleen, all that stuff will be inspected by an inspector here to make sure there's nothing wrong with the beef."

And Parish will be supervising, although the effort is so new, he hasn't quite settled on a job title.

Radil: "What's your title going to be?"

Parish: "Just the head slaughter person. Or head ..."

He finally settles on "head butcher."

The trailer will be run by the Puget Sound Meat Producers Cooperative. It will travel throughout a six–county area with a USDA inspector. After their animals are slaughtered, farmers can take them to a local butcher shop to be cut, wrapped and sold. That will provide work for artisan butchers like Tracy Smaciarz. He describes a local farmer whose beef will now be served in high–end Seattle restaurants like Canlis.

Smaciarz: "With having the mobile slaughter unit her beef can now be sold locally in western Washington, before she couldn't sell her beef."

Now their animals can stay close to home, and foodies will likely see the names of more local farms on area menus.

I'm Amy Radil, KUOW News.

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