The demand for locally grown food is ballooning, but it turns out that local meat is almost a misnomer.
Small ranchers in El Dorado County gathered at a Local Meat Summit in Placerville last week to beef, if you will, about how hard it is to sell to local consumers.
Ranchers who want to sell an individual tri-tip or tenderloin at a farmers market or store have to have it harvested – the current word for slaughtered – at a facility approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
There aren't many of those.
Consequently, that can mean a 500-mile journey, round trip, for locally raised meats, said Fred Hunt, who organized last week's summit on behalf of the Resource Conservation Districts of El Dorado County and the Georgetown Divide.
His hope was to bring ranchers and consumers together, but the meat meeting was mostly producers, with few buyers.
Cattle from around Sacramento may be hauled to Stockton, Modesto or Orland for processing, before they can be sold locally, ranchers said.
The only alternative is to sell animals – whole, halves or quarters – to consumers who can legally have their own animal harvested on their own land and then processed nearby, they said.
One Shingle Springs processor, Castle Meats, can do that for beef owners – not for resale – but few people can handle the resulting hundreds of pounds of meat at once.
"I was trying to find out how I can get local, fresh meat," said Heather Simonson of Diamond Springs, one of the few consumers present at the summit. "I'm into the local organic sort of thing."
She doesn't have the freezer space for a quarter beef, she said.
The USDA rules make it difficult, if not impossible, for small producers to sell through the new Placerville Co-op, where Simonson shops.
"I'd love for the co-op to carry local stuff," Hunt said.
"I've got a couple of restaurants that would love to run our beef," said rancher George Forni.
Sean Kriletich of the UC Cooperative Extension in Amador and Calaveras, is working with ranchers there to work in that direction.
"We're trying to work toward getting a USDA-inspected facility for our region," Kriletich said.
Locally raised, locally sold meat would put on fewer miles that way, but the economics are iffy, he said.
People are also trying to develop a mobile facility that could be brought to county fairgrounds for local meat harvesting and processing.
If more small ranchers can find a way to sell grass-fed beef locally, it'll do more than benefit the farmers, Kriletich said.
Those who wish to preserve open space should be ranchers' allies.
"If people want to keep more land in agriculture, we have to get more money to the producers," said Kriletich, who said he used to run cattle himself, where El Dorado Hills subdivisions now sit.