New meat processing facility makes Mesman farm more productive

The new Island Grown Farmers Cooperative (IGFC) meat processing facility at The Port of Skagit in Burlington is a dream come true for its 80 regional members, including the Mesman Dairy.

Still primarily an organic dairy, the Mesman family began raising and selling beef, lamb and pork in 2019. Besides selling meat and eggs at their farm store at Chilberg and Dodge Valley Roads, they also supply meat for several local restaurants and the La Conner School District.

IGFC has been their partner all along. IGFC owns and operates a USDA-inspected mobile slaughter unit that comes to the farm when it’s time to “harvest” meat. In the processing plant, the meat is cut, wrapped and vacuum sealed. Every step in the process is USDA-inspected.

At its old quarters in the former Peth Meat plant on Darcy Road, employees “worked on top of each other,” said Travis Stockstill, IGFC supervisor of cut and wrap.

“Shuffling materials was like playing Tetris. There was a lot of wasted time and frustration.”

The new, much larger IGFC facility offers three autonomous lines instead of one and a half.

“One line can be working on one project and another line can be doing a smaller order without overlapping on table space,” Stockstill said.

The new sausage machine can hold 200 pounds of meat at a time and produce two thousand pounds of sausage links and patties a day. The old one held just 50. A smoker will come online soon to produce bacon and other cured meats.

Faster, more reliable production plus greatly expanded freezer storage is very good news for the Mesmans.

Demand for their meat has been strong since March 2020, when shoppers who couldn’t find meat in grocery stores bought out the Mesman’s inventory almost overnight.

“IGFC was a big help during the pandemic,” said Ben Mesman. “They were always there working, they never stopped. We needed beef meat all the time and we could always get in.”

While the new IGFC plant will eventually be able to process 16 beef a day, some constraints are still present.

For one thing, more trained butchers are “desperately needed, everywhere,” said Chelsy Mesman.

Stockstill, a former member of the U.S. Butcher team, concurs. His staff members are either people like La Conner High School ’77 grad Dave Bretvick, who has been a meat cutter since he was 16, or they are new and learning from the ground up.

Stockstill hopes to implement an apprenticeship program developed by the American Association of Meat Producers. “It will pay for half of people’s training, and I need people to train!”

Another constraint is membership in the IGFC.

“We have 20 people waiting just to become members,” Stockstill said. “Every day I get phone calls from people who want to raise an animal and are doing a feasibility study. They are finding out that you have to find your processor first and every place is booked out a year and half.”

The last constraint?

“It takes three years to grow beef, get them up to a good weight, and get a good cut out of them,” said Chelsy Mesman.

“We’ve been so grateful that the community has supported us, but when we sell out, we can’t grow animals any faster.”