My wife and I have raised beef and pigs for our own consumption and direct sale to friends and neighbors. I just recently learned that the Vermont Agency of Agriculture considers our activities illegal.

Mel Huff wrote an article in the Times Argus about Peter Harvey, a backyard pig farmer in Calais, who raised three pigs in 2006, had them slaughtered on his property, and brought the meat to the New England Culinary Institute (NECI) for the students to learn cutting on. He was doing the porcine equivalent of donating one's body to medical science, for medical and nursing students to dissect in their anatomy class. Except that Harvey expected to get his pigs' meat back, neatly cut and packaged.

When Harvey called NECI the next week to find out how the work on the meat was coming, he was told that a state meat inspector had seized it. The meat inspector had come through the NECI kitchen while the cutting was happening, and he asked where the inspection stamp for the meat was. There was none, since it was a backyard slaughter operation. Harvey says he phoned several people at the state, ahead of the slaughter, to make sure that what he was doing was legal. He understood that, as long as he sold the meat by the side, and not as individual pieces, that he was within the law. The people who bought the meat were really half-owners of the pig. The meat inspector said otherwise.

My wife and I had always believed that selling the meat by the animal or half animal was permitted for on-farm slaughter operations. We liked that approach. Instead of being herded onto a strange truck, transported along bumpy roads, and disgorged into an unfamiliar facility, the animal is killed quickly in its own territory, before it knows what happened. Often, we'd call the animal over with a little of its favorite food-grain for a beef animal, or apples or zucchini for a pig. It would die with its mouth full of good food.

Rural Vermont engaged Vermont Law School interns to research the Vermont laws on backyard slaughter, the federal laws they were based on, and how other states interpret them. Amy Shollenberger, executive director of Rural Vermont, said that Vermont laws re-state federal laws. The law says that anywhere “owner” is written into the law, the plural “owners” may be read, as well. And it also says that on-farm slaughter is allowed for meat that will be consumed by the owner (or owners) or given to their workers or non-paying guests. So it's pretty easy to read the law to say that if someone becomes an owner of half a pig, it is permitted to slaughter the animal on the farm and sell the half as cut pieces.

Indeed, the state of Maine reads the law that way, according to Shollenberger. Maine allows the structure of community supported agriculture (CSA) to be used for meat animal raising, with up to three owners per animal. They are interpreting exactly the same federal law, but their interpretation is less restrictive than the Vermont Agency of Agriculture's.

Last year, Peter Harvey and his neighbors used a CSA structure for the pigs he raised and slaughtered on the farm. He repeatedly tried to get an opinion from the meat inspector as to whether that was OK, but the inspector never got back to him. The inspector had been supportive of what Harvey wanted to do, Harvey said, but couldn't find a way to say it was legal. Asked if he thought the inspector might regret ever coming across Harvey's meat at NECI, Harvey laughed and said yes.

Janet Ancel, the representative from Calais, plans to introduce legislation to clarify that backyard slaughter and sale by the half animal is legal in Vermont, according to Harvey and Shollenberger. Roger Allbee, the Secretary of Agriculture, isn't ruling anything out about what they would support. He said they are studying the law and other states' interpretations of it, trying to find a way to support farmers while protecting the health of their customers.

As Harvey and Shollenberger point out, people have been raising and slaughtering their animals on the farm since domestic animals were first kept, and there's probably been trade of half-animals since as long as economic exchange has existed. I'd like to see the Agency of Agriculture get out ahead of the legislature on this one and make a rule that interprets state and federal law the same way the state of Maine does, allowing three owners of the same meat animal. If they won't do that, I hope they support Ancel's bill in the legislature. It's time for the state to get out of the way of people who are trying to raise their own meat and share it with their neighbors.

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I interviewed Harvey and Shollenberger on Relocalizing Vermont on WGDR. Look for downloadable MP3 files of those interviews soon at the Vermont Peak Oil Network audio page

You can reach me at relocalizingvermont[AT]yahoo.com