Photos by Michael Piazza / Styled by Catrine Kelty

The demand for meat swept through Central Massachusetts farms this spring after the coronavirus pandemic temporarily shut down major meatpacking plants in the Midwest. Finding supermarket meat counters bare, shoppers turned to local producers, many for the first time. Phones at farm stores rang nonstop, with requests for everything from hamburger to a side of beef. Websites crashed under the load of online meat ordering.

Joan Walker, owner of Walker Farm at Whortleberry Hill in New Braintree, remembers the day the demand hit. Walker has a small retail store in the barn where she sells meat from her herd of certified grass-fed Red Devon cattle, as well as pork and chicken from neighboring farms.

“We opened up at 9, and I didn’t get a break until 1:30,” she said. “One lady, who had never been here before, bought $600 worth of meat.” Walker usually raises between 60 and 70 cows and has about a dozen of them slaughtered for meat sales. This year she plans on having an additional three cows processed. “It’s been a wild ride,” she said. “No one knows what normal is anymore.”

At the 350-acre Lilac Hedge Farm in Holden, one of the largest meat producers in Central Massachusetts, online orders for home delivery exploded. From 30–40 orders a week before the pandemic struck Massachusetts to 500–700 orders a week ever since. “Our sales have doubled over the same period last year,” says the farm’s owner, Ryan MacKay. He adds that, “At the same time, my payroll has tripled.”

MacKay increased his herd of 150 cows and added 150 piglets this spring. He doubled the number of turkeys that will be raised for holiday meals this fall and is processing 400 chickens every other week.

For farms that sell poultry, business has been like holiday shopping since mid-March. Kate Stillman, owner of Stillman Quality Meats in Hardwick, where the majority of the meat raised and processed is poultry, notes that Thanksgiving is a benchmark. “Normally it’s our busiest time of year,” she said.

This year Thanksgiving came months early for poultry producers, and it hasn’t let up. “My crew and I are working till 11pm every night,” Stillman said. “We are about at our limits.”

At the retail meat store at Adams Farm in Athol, “Customers weren’t quite fighting over packages of ground beef, but pretty close to it,” said Ed Maltby, Adams’ general manager.

The majority of meat farms in Central Massachusetts are small, and their sudden popularity has been a heady, if a little disconcerting, experience. By early June, many had sold off their stocks of meat that were to have lasted till fall.

“I’m almost out of meat,” Walker said in early June. “I have only a couple packages of sausage and kielbasa.”

Walker says she has cows that could be processed, but like many of her neighbors, has run up against a barrier that has long beset area farms. There aren’t enough slaughterhouses in the state to handle the needs of local meat farmers, much less the increase in demand from their customers. Walker says she can’t get an appointment to have her cows slaughtered until August.

She’s lucky to have only a few months’ wait. Adams Farm, the largest slaughterhouse in Central Massachusetts, is booking appointments well into 2021. “We’re doing what we can for our regular customers and we’re giving preference to farms that raise their own meat,” Maltby said. “But we are stretched to our limits, too.”

The size of Adams’ operation is in stark contrast to the huge slaughterhouse complexes in the Midwest where thousands of employees work and more than 10,000 coronavirus cases have been reported. The 16,800-square-foot Adams facility in Athol has a total of 44 employees working in its slaughterhouse, meat cutting room and retail store. Adam’s slaughterhouse is animal welfare approved and certified organic. Its holding pens and one-way chute system were designed by Dr. Temple Grandin, the world's leading authority in the humane handling of meat animals. There have been no Covid-19 cases at Adams as of early June.

“We’re able to keep social distance for the slaughter portion of the business, but the meat-cutting department is limited in space,” Maltby explained. “We supply masks and gloves; we don’t have the space to provide barriers.” Adams offered employees bonus pay and asked that they not go out into the community. A few of Adams’ employees stayed home during the early weeks of the pandemic, though by early summer the staff was building up.

“It was a struggle to keep operating at full strength with fewer employees,” Maltby said. “But our main concern was the health of our employees.”

With Adams at its limit, meat farms in Central Massachusetts scrambled to find alternatives. Matt Koziol, who sells meat from his herd of 90 Devon cattle on the website Farmermattwb.com, said he started calling every butcher in a 200-mile radius in an attempt to schedule extra slots for his animals to be butchered. Most were booked well into 2021 and not taking new customers, Koziol found. He was eventually able to get slaughter appointments at Meatworks in Westport, Massachusetts, and New England Meat Company in Stafford Springs, Connecticut.

Even large farms like Lilac Hedge were challenged to find additional slaughterhouse appointments. “It’s typically a problem in the fall,” MacKay said. Usually summer is the slower season, but not this year. “We’ve never before had difficulty adding slots at the slaughterhouse in summer,” MacKay said.

Lilac Hedge uses Adams Farm to process their meat, but with the increased demand they’ve added other New England processors, including Valley View Farm in Templeton; Herring Brothers Meats Processing Plant in Guilford, Maine; Common Wealth Poultry Co. in Gardiner, Maine and Sharon Beef Company in Sharon, Vermont.

Stillman has her own processing facility at the farm, so she doesn’t have to search for appointments at slaughterhouses. “Other meat farms are looking at 18- to 24-month waits,” she said. “It’s a hell of a predicament.”

Time is an important factor when it comes to processing meat. It takes up to three years or more to raise a beef cow and, after slaughter, additional weeks for aging. “Since we have our beef hung for three weeks, we have a lot of inventory at the slaughterhouse,” MacKay explained. Hanging beef after slaughter in temperature- and humidity-controlled cooling rooms dry ages the meat to develop flavor and tenderness.

Not every farmer was disconcerted by the increase in demand for meat. “Honestly, I think it was a flash in the pan,” said Kim Denney, owner of Chestnut Farms in Hardwick, where she raises cattle, pigs, goats, lamb and chicken. The majority of Chestnut Farms’ sales are CSA shares—the farm was the first in Central Massachusetts to introduce CSAs—and currently there is a waiting list.

“We’re holding steady,” Denney said. Chestnut Farms also sells curbside at Boston Public Market and at farmers markets in Natick and Needham. The only major change has been in pickups for CSA shares; they are now drivet-hrough with no contact between customers and farm staff.

The sudden increase in demand for that flavorful beef caused some farms to change their business plan.

“We’re used to having business models that project five or 10 years into the future. Now, your business model can be obsolete in a month,” said Stillman, who shifted her business’s focus when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Before, she focused on retail sales of poultry, beef, pork and lamb she raises; she quickly shifted to online shopping and home delivery from Worcester to the Greater Boston area.

Over the past four years Stillman Quality Meats has developed a niche as the only poultry slaughterhouse in Central Massachusetts. In 2018 Stillman launched The Butcher Shop in Worcester’s Canal District as an outlet to sell her meat in addition to farmers markets and her farm’s onsite retail store in Hardwick. After online sales and requests for home delivery exploded in mid-March, the Worcester store’s hours were reduced to Saturdays only while the farm’s outlet remained open.

“We’ll never have enough beef to meet demand,” Stillman said. “We are trying to encourage our customers to buy chicken and pork.”

MacKay said the increased demand for local meat at Lilac Hedge “caused us to completely shift our business model, at least for the short term” and said he’s had to make some difficult decisions. “For at least eight years we’ve stored our meat in freezers at Indian Head Farm in Berlin, but with the increased demand, we were going back and forth from Berlin to Holden so often, we couldn’t keep it up.”

He rented a tractor-trailer freezer, bought a second one and added three 40-foot shipping container freezers for the farm. “Everyone has been understanding of our time crunch,” MacKay said. “The town of Holden got three-phase power installed at the farm within a week.”

Lilac Hedge had been building a customer base for home delivery for the past year. “We had the software in place so we could scale up,” MacKay said. “Now we deliver to Worcester County and east including Essex County, the North Shore, Boston and Middlesex County, plus we sell at three farmers markets on Cape Cod.”

The “wild ride” experienced by meat farmers in Central Massachusetts could come to an abrupt halt, however, if the economy falters or the pandemic surges.

“We don’t have a crystal ball. No one knows what it’s going to be like a few months from now,” said Susan Miner, head of retail sales at Bob’s Turkey Farm in Lancaster. The 66-year-old family-run farm is home to 12,000 turkeys that are raised and processed on the site.

“During the meat scare, we were swamped,” Miner said. “We have a small retail store, but we are just not set up to do curbside pickup. So, we limit customers to one at a time in the store and disinfect everything we can several times a day.”

During nice weather people don’t mind waiting outside, Miner explained, “But come fall, that could all change.” Fall is the prime season for the turkey farm, she said. “What if the virus comes back, and people don’t come out to pick up their orders?”

At Lilac Hedge Farm, MacKay hopes that customers’ appreciation for the quality of local meat will translate into loyalty.

“People tell us they’ve discovered the value of local meat and will continue to buy it, but it’s hard to predict,” he said. “We’ll consider it successful if we retain 25% of the new business we’ve gotten.”

While the new business has been a boon to the region’s small farms, some were also overwhelmed by the demands of new customers who don’t understand the challenges they face.

Farmers like Walker have not forgotten the loyal customers whose business sustained them in the days before the pandemic. “I’m keeping a Covid new customer list,” she said. “And when I have meat again my regular customers will come first.”

Adamsfarm.biz
Bobsturkeyfarm.com
Chestnutfarms.org
Farmermattwb.com
Lilachedgefarm.com
Stillmanqualitymeats.com
Walkergrassfed.com

This story appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of Edible Worcester.