Karen Machetta fell in love with agriculture in college when she learned to milk a cow in a dairy production course. She was a city girl who had spent summers on her grandma’s farm and still lovingly remembers every detail of the arrangement of nesting boxes in the hen house. Karen started her own farm in north central Missouri in 1976.
For 27 years, she raised rabbits, chickens, turkeys, pigs, calves, lambs and laying hens. Karen processed all those animals in her back yard and sold them directly to customers from the farm. Without USDA certified meat, she was restricted from selling to restaurants, grocery stores or even at the local farmers’ market.
Over the years, the market grew for her free range, hormone-and antibiotic-free animals, until she reached the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s legal limit of 2,000 animals a year that could be processed on-farm. And with no slaughterhouse in Missouri willing to take small batches of livestock, Karen was at a crossroads.
She could have just scaled back, but this innovator observed a greater need. Dozens of family operations, ranging in size from a few to a few thousand animals, also needed a place to have their livestock slaughtered, cleaned, packaged and frozen. And consumers wanted chemical-free, locally raised meat. So Karen decided to start her own USDA-inspected plant.
Mid-Missouri’s Poultry Processing Plant, established in 2001, now operates with a staff of five people, serves over 100 clients, and may at last turn a profit in 2004. The plant can process up to 400 poultry and rabbits a day with its current staffing, and will take as few as 25. Unwilling to turn anyone away, however, Karen whispers she’d consent to running three birds at a time if it would help out a neighbor. The plant operates Monday to Friday between the open hours of 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
It hasn’t been an easy road, but starting the business was something Karen felt necessary.
“Without the plant, nothing else was going to work,” she said, explaining that if she wanted to grow her business, she had to find a way to get her meat USDA certified. Because of federal rules and local processors geared toward large scale producers, Karen saw no way any small scale Missouri livestock producers could grow and flourish without a processing plant of their own.
“Until somebody stepped up to the plate and swung the bat, there was no hope for the little guy,” she declared.
Determined to be that batter, Karen went out in search of start-up capital—and there encountered her first hurdle. The entrepreneur was turned down by bank after bank, all of which were reluctant to loan money without a local precedent for a small-scale processing plant that could prove her venture would be successful. So Karen sold 10 acres of her own land, and later 40 more, to finance the project. She also found numerous individual investors.
Family, friends and neighbors proved vital, coming up with spare change to grease the gears just when Karen thought she’d run out of money and options.
Funding has not been the only challenge. Karen has also wrestled with the USDA because of the plant’s scale. Since the 2,000-capacity facility doesn’t operate when there aren’t enough animals to be open, the inspector assigned to the building is inconvenienced by an irregular schedule. The USDA has thrown arbitrary hurdles in her path, she says, which makes her wonder if the department sees Mid-Missouri’s Processing Plant as a nuisance and wants to shut it down.
But driven by a strong belief in the value of the project, Karen is committed to seeing it through. “Things of quality take time,” she calmly states. She believes small scale farmers and processors simply produce higher quality meat than agribusinesses raising animals in confinement and processing them in large-scale, high speed, mechanized facilities.
At her small plant, Karen explained, birds are each hand-eviscerated, ensuring less tear of the bowl where pathogens are contained, and inspectors have more time to examine each carcass for signs of contamination.
Between running the plant and working full time off the farm as a respiratory therapist, Karen has had to let go of raising animals. But being at the hub of the local meat market, she has the satisfaction of helping it thrive by referring her former meat buyers to growers that are her current clients at the plant.
Ultimately, Karen hopes to raise livestock again, but not on the scale she used to. She loves animals because of their peaceful, gentle natures, and because that lifestyle gave her the chance to spend more time with her family. Her son Anthony, who has been involved in the family operation all his life, helping his mom collect eggs, feed the chickens, and raise capital to start the plant, plans to major in business at college and considers coming back to run the family business.
By that time, Karen is likely to have opened a second plant in southern Missouri . She expects to have sufficient staffing and regular clientele at her current plant to consistently process 500 animals a day by 2007, and at that point would break ground on the new facility.