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Facing rising business costs in a rapidly consolidating industry, Redwood Meat Co., the only USDA-certified slaughterhouse for nearly 200 miles in any direction, recently stopped processing animal carcasses, including beef, hogs, lambs and goats. The shutdown not only brings a halt to a family-run business that has been in operation since 1951; it has also had reverberating impacts across the local farming, ranching and retail sectors.

Unless an outside investment comes through soon — which is a long shot, according to Redwood Meat plant operator Ryan Nylander — then Redwood Meat Co. will likely close permanently, leaving the region’s numerous small-scale meat producers with limited options and increased costs.

Nylander didn’t have much to say when reached by phone Monday morning, offering brief replies to a series of questions. He said rapidly increasing bills for essentials such as insurance, water and utilities simply grew unsustainable.

“It was already a marginal business,” Nylander said, “but once the cost of doing business went up so much, you can’t even charge enough at our capacity [to break even].”

His uncle and longtime co-owner John “Punk” Nylander was even more succinct. 

“PG&E got us,” he said. “California got us. We’re just not running enough stuff through here to pay the bills.”

As recently as nine months ago, Redwood Meat Co. had 14 employees, according to the younger Nylander. But layoffs became necessary even before the recent shutdown. The business, which is located on the outskirts of Eureka’s Myrtletown neighborhood, slaughtered and butchered farm animals across the region, including lambs from Ferndale, organic pork from Del Norte County’s Alexandre Family Farms and beef from ranchers in Willow Creek, the Eel River Valley and beyond.

Local ranchers reached by the Outpost say that the loss of Redwood Meat Co. could threaten their own ability to make a profit selling meat, and if another option doesn’t come along soon they may be forced to make dramatic changes to their businesses. And small-scale producers are the hardest hit.

For example, Liz and Hugo Clopper are the owner-operators of Bear River Valley Beef, a family-run cattle-farming operation that sells beef directly to the public, including online and at farmers’ markets, along with some sales to local grocery stores including Wildberries. Redwood Meat Co. slaughtered and processed all of the beef they produced for the past 20 years, and Liz Clopper said she’s not sure what her farm will do now that they’ve shut down.

“I have no easy answer,” she said. “Redwood Meat is what we call critical infrastructure for local beef, and it’s gone.”

Beef, pork and other meats can’t be sold commercially unless the animals were slaughtered at a facility that’s been certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Now that Redwood Meat Co. is shut down, the nearest USDA-certified kill facilities are in Yreka and Sonoma County.

“And none are particularly viable for small operators,” Clopper said.

While Redwood Meat Co. could process a few head of cattle whenever they were delivered, local ranchers need to ship their animals out of the area and wait at least a day or two for them to be slaughtered and processed before having the meat shipped back up here to Humboldt in trucks with refrigeration or freezer trailers.

“Truck and trailer costs are pretty expensive for any operation, small or big,” Clopper said. “Redwood Meat had pretty reasonable prices, and they offered a lot of services — local deliveries, storage in their freezer locker, transportation to people like Taylor’s Sausages [in Cave Junction, Ore.] with value-added products. To find an all-in-one shop like that is pretty difficult.”

Some local ranchers were caught completely off guard by Redwood Meat’s closure. Melanie Cunningham of Shakefork Community Farm (near Carlotta) said that as a medium-sized farm that includes a cattle operation, they only get beef processed once per year, and ever since COVID they’ve had to make their appointments a full year in advance. 

“We found out two weeks after our scheduled dates that all [Redwood Meat Co.’s] dates had been canceled,” Cunningham said. “It put us all in a panic.”

Shakefork and other ranching operations in the area were notified via email back in May that Redwood Meat Co. may soon be sold, but the notice said that there shouldn’t be any interruption in service, according to Cunningham.

After learning that their dates had been canceled, Cunningham and her partners heard rumors — first that Redwood Meat had shut down entirely, then that they were still processing carcasses for some suppliers on request. “So it’s really up and down; we were in limbo,” she said.

Ultimately, the farmers at Shakefork had to pivot away from selling their beef commercially.

“Most of what we produce we can consume among family and friends,” Cunningham said. “But it does reshape our marketing plans. We will no longer be selling to farmers markets or [providing meet] to CSA [farm shares] and direct sales. It’s gonna really reduce availability.”

Larger operations may have an easier time adapting to the loss of a local slaughterhouse facility, but it’s still having a negative impact on operations, said Humboldt Grassfed Beef President and Owner Sarah Mora.

“When you lose infrastructure — which is what I would consider Redwood Meat Co., like Humboldt Creamery and the sawmill, anywhere you can take raw products turn them into consumer products — it hurts,” she said. “It doesn’t just hurt me, it hurts everybody.”

Humboldt Grassfed has been using a mobile slaughtering facility based in Petaluma for the past few weeks but will soon transition to Yosemite Valley Beef in Merced. The added logistical challenges have inevitably increased costs, though Mora said Ayres Distributing has been able to ship their products to existing customers in the Bay Area, Sonoma County and elsewhere. 

“Probably for us this challenge is something we can meet,” Mora said. “The people who really are going to be hurt are the smaller producers. … It’s not just that we’re losing [local] harvesting.  [Redwood Meat] is also a USDA cut facility, and there’s not another in Humboldt County, so we’re losing out on two fronts.”

The rising costs for local producers will only exacerbate the impacts of a nationwide spike in beef prices in recent years, a trend that’s been fueled by multiple factors, including fewer beef cattle, drought and higher grain costs.

Thomas Nicholson Stratton, who operates Foggy Bottoms Boys in Ferndale with his husband, Cody, said they’re now shipping product to and from both Modesto and Yreka for processing.

“It’s very challenging, but nonetheless it’s something that has to be done if we want to keep working as a company,” he said. The additional shipping costs have added at least $1.00 to $1.50 per pound to the company’s own costs, according to Nicholson Stratton. That forced Foggy Bottoms Boys to raise meat prices for the first time since the pandemic. 

Nicholson Stratton said that if no one comes in to save Redwood Meat Co. or establish a new local option, it could jeopardize their business and many others in the region.

“If we can’t hold things in, specific to our fuel costs and [finding] more efficient transportation, then it will be a threat to our business,” he said. “Not only that, it’s also a threat to the growth of our business.” Foggy Bottoms Boys has been looking to expand and diversify by offering pork sausage and other value-added meat products. They have several pending grant applications that they hoped would allow them to do further processing at their own farm.

“But we have to have USDA meats to be able to do that,” Nicholson Stratton said.

Redwood Meat Co.’s shutdown has also impacted local grocery stores, including the North Coast Co-op’s two locations, in Eureka and Arcata. The Co-op was the only local grocery store that received full carcasses from Redwood Meat Co. and broke them down in their own butcher operations, according to Emi Lee, the Arcata store manager. But first the animals had to be slaughtered and their carcasses gutted and cleaned at a USDA-certified facility.

“We were one of the last areas in the state that had a local processor who could do that for us,” Lee said. “We took a lot for granted having Redwood Meat here. Hopefully we can get back to that someday, but who knows when it’s ever gonna happen again.”

Consumers may already be noticing higher meat prices and missing out on products they loved. Alexandre Family Farm in Del Norte County was the longtime supplier of fresh pork to the North Coast Co-op, but Lee said the farm has been unable to find a new processor that can provide whole pig carcasses to the store.

“So we’re not able to sell their pork anymore,” Lee said. “That was really special. I’m really bummed to not be able to keep doing that.”

The Co-op is also no longer receiving full-carcass lambs from Ferndale Farms, since their meat is being processed out of the county and shipped back frozen to preserve freshness. 

“Everyone’s feeling it across the whole area,” Lee said. “Right now it’s sort of crisis mode. We need to make sure we can keep everyone in business and keep the community with locally raised beef [and other meat], even if it’s not locally processed.”

Potential solutions

Local ranchers and other stakeholders have been gathering since early May to deal with the potential loss of Redwood Meat Co., according to Portia Bramble, executive director of the nonprofit North Coast Growers’ Association.

“We have a collaborative group of producers working behind the scenes to tackle this important issue,” she said when reached by phone on Monday.

A few of those producers, along with some investment groups, expressed interest in purchasing Redwood Meat Co., but a deal has thus far proved elusive amid strict USDA regulations and the challenges of operating such an old facility that has some antiquated infrastructure. On the regulatory side, the Nylanders may need to keep the business in operation and maintain some percentage of ownership for their facilities to maintain their USDA licensing, Bramble said.

She emphasized that much of the local ranching industry’s success over the years can be directly attributed to Redwood Meat Co. and the Nylanders, who went out of their way to meet the specific and varied demands of local ranchers.

“They really had a business model that was aligned with our local producers’ needs,” she said. “That might also imply that it wasn’t the most lucrative business. There were some nuances to what they were doing. It worked for a number of years, but I’m not sure it’s a business model that could go into the future.”

Humboldt County also lacks large-scale cold storage facilities, Bramble pointed out. While some farmers, including Clopper, have installed their own walk-in freezers, many other producers struggled to line up a temperature-controlled supply chain.

”Even if they can take the time to ship animals out of the area, it’s a whole new business model for frozen [products],” Bramble said.

In meetings with local producers, including the Foggy Bottoms Boys, the North Coast Growers’ Association (NCGA) has looked for ways to keep Redwood Meat Co. afloat while also looking to the future.

”We’d like to support a new, modern facility that’s able to do more … including full-scale processing that’s also value-added,” such as making sausage, ground beef and other consumer-ready products, Bramble said. 

The NCGA has been working with the California Center for Rural Policy, the Arcata Economic Development Corporation and others on large-scale economic development planning through California’s Jobs First Regional Investment Initiative. A local initiative called Redwood Region RISE (Resilient Inclusive Sustainable Economy) has identified areas in need of investment, including meat processing.

“We’ve submitted a large-scale funding proposal to support this project of building a new processing plant on the North Coast,” Bramble said, though she noted that the process is, by design, slow and thoughtful, with input being gathered from a wide variety of business sectors. (A long-term strategic plan should be released to the public soon, she added.)

In the meantime, producers, grocers and others are hopeful that Redwood Meat Co. may yet be salvaged. In our brief phone conversation with Ryan Nylander, he said, “We’re hopeful for some investment, but if it doesn’t come through pretty quick — .” He didn’t finish the sentence.

Lee, the Arcata Co-op manager, said he floated the idea of forming an ownership co-operative to take over Redwood Meat Co., but such an endeavor would likely involve many financial and logistical hurdles, including hiring from outside the area to fill specialized positions in the slaughterhouse. In the meantime, the Co-op has had to raise meat prices to at least partially cover their own increased costs.

Meanwhile, Cunningham, of Shakefork Community Farm, said there’s one possible legislative solution on the horizon. Last year, federal legislators introduced the PRIME (Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption) Act, which would open the door to allow for legal sales of animals that have been slaughtered and processed on farms.

“We do that with chickens,” Cunningham said. “We have a federal exemption for up to 20,000 chickens on our farm, so there is a precedent.”

But under current law, as noted above, any large animal meat sold commercially has to come from a USDA-inspected facility. 

“It’s really created a bottleneck as more and more of these local abattoirs go out of business,” Cunningham said. “It really can’t pencil out these days, and it has been a story across the country, with [smaller] slaughterhouses consolidating into these massive things. We don’t want that.”

Humboldt County already has several on-farm butchers, who can be used for meat that farmers feed themselves and their friends. While some organizations, including the Safe Food Coalition, have voiced food safety concerns about the PRIME Act, Cunningham thinks the model could work well on a larger scale here in Humboldt County.

“It feels so much better to have an animal never leave our farm, never be transported — it’s just nicer way to process meat,” she said. Shipping the carcasses out the area for processing isn’t practical, economical or necessary, in her view. “It’s definitely time to rethink it if we want to have flourishing local food networks.”