Black Earth Meats

Welcome to our tour of our facility. We'll talk about our So here at Black Earth Meats we started with a vision statement which is pulling the animals off pasture focused on organics, h You can see here we have old Wisconsin, we have the pastures, we even have the old red barn we deal with artisan cheeses and heritage animals. So we have pasture-aided c And then it's t Reconnecting the pride of the farmers and the h What we do here at Black Earth Meats is take t So we can lower the cost for everyone w T In 2008 we took over what was then a country meat cutter we immediately did a full renovation on the interior, gutted the building down to the bare walls and started from scratch. We worked with a USDA recommended HACCP coordinator and long time consultant in the industry Tom Bates. I'm happy to say Tom Bates is now my operations manager. In the process we immediately got our USDA certification. So we're now licensed by the USDA and the FSIS. We got our USDA organic certification through the state of Iowa Department of Agriculture. We have our animal welfare approved licensing. They come in every year to ensure that our animal handling meets their specifications. On top of it we have the food safety net service third party audit for h So we have four layers of h So we're here at the unloading station for the animals. The trucks will back up here and the first step is we have a couple gates that swing around and attach to the truck itself and that creates a self-contained corral. As you'll notice no one is allowed to unload at all until they first checked in with the office and second have been certified to have h One of our employees with h So the gates come and they collapse. This gate here will close and lock keeping the h T We have no use of the shock prod. Our two primary tools are the little flicker here w So we move them up these gates and then they have a nice natural progression into the holding pen. The whole time it's designed that they cannot turn around, that they want to keep moving in one direction and they don't face any barriers that shock them or scare them or make them want to run. Let's pretend you're a steer. You've just been dropped off from the truck. Now let's follow your path into the facility. Now that we're on the inside I'm going to pass the tour off tom Bates the operations manager. So Tom take us through our holding pens. The holding pen design is very simple. It holds 15 to 20 animals based upon size. We use a lot of chutes and gate systems to segregate and handle the cattle. We have a safe zone that I'm standing in right now to keep our people in personnel from getting injured or hurt by the cattle. It all kind of speaks for itself. As you can see most of these panels are all collapsible, movable so we can get to and get away from cattle, move cattle any w And it's designed to hold either farms or beef one species at a time. First step in the slaughter operation is the knocking pen knock box. In our knocking pen design we've also incorporated a head restrainer that the animal's in and when you're going to knock it you've got it secured so you have no misses. We do some security knocks but basically we've passed all h Our system works and it is a good one. After the point of knocking the animals are rolled out into the dry landing area we incorporate t And after the animal Take it up to the bleeding and head evisceration station. Step two in the process we're not an on the rail system we're a skinning bed. So the animals are lowered from the bleeding head removal onto the skinning bed. At we then raise it to half hoist and we do a zero tolerance for fecal and ingesta and we spray elactic acid as an intervention only. With that being said and that station being done the animals then move to the evisceration station w Inspector watches the evisceration for contamination, inspects the evisceration, inspects all the organs and says t And when we have that okay the animal is then lowered onto the rail. We use a down puller to lessen contamination for airborne hair, dust, manure, whatever you can, whatever is on the outside of a By using the down puller it lessens, it just lessens its exposure. Once we have the We have killed a lot of pathogens, we have wounded a lot of pathogens and by using a hot water wash here we will kill and reduce and eliminate even more. And as an example we will start out on the skinning bed with a green carcass before any trim of a total plate counts of maybe seven to eight hundred thousand. By the time we get it to t After the We reinspect and trim the carcass for zero tolerance and then we put it on the hot scale, weigh it, record tag n We now cold water wash the animal again and apply another five percent or less lactic acid treatment for post c The kill floor is staffed by approximately eight people. We do not move people from station to station. If we do move anybody you can only move backward on a station to a certain point because after that you're going to be contaminating your product. So what we try to ac They wash down between each beef, sterilize, knives, so forth, so on and even if they're totally washed down, they're looking good, it doesn't matter. People working on a skinning bed that are exposed to So we just don't do that. You can fall back to a dirty station but you can't step forward to a cleaner station. By proper staffing on t Our own protocols, our own procedures, limit is to one beef every six minutes. USDA that is here at all times during slaughter operations on oversight, so forth and so on, they have no problem with our speed of one every six minutes. By staffing t It's called a drip cooler, a pre-chill, storage cooler, In a pre-c He basically sorts, segregates, spaces cattle or hogs, whatever the case may be, monitors the cooler for condensation and that's it, that's all we do in t We maintain temperature in t From there they're just staged for processing. We're here in the processing room, it's a large room, we set it up every morning depending upon what we're doing. Anywhere from commercial processing, portion cutting, private labeling, fabrication of pork or beef. What you're looking at be We're boning conventional cows for a customer that wants, I believe it's 20 head boned out, all he wants is 85% lean and tender ones, that's all we're doing. Everyt On pork production it goes pretty much the same as beef production as I stated. We do it commercially for customer specifications. Portion cut line we can set up at the same time that we're doing a commercial beef line. We can also set up a pork line and a beef line at the same time and keep everyt The USDA is happy with t We do organics before we do any conventional. We try and do conventional all day long or we try and do it organics all day long. We try not to comb in or anyt I don't know if you've got the top row is denoted for the slaughter floor. We've got an operational sanitation, pre-operational sanitation, zero tolerance, h All those daily clipboards, everyone goes to a different station, everybody has a different job, everybody's responsible for it and then we verify everyt That being said there's also a lot of other records that we post. USDA wants somet We're a small plant, we're always busy. Therefore everyt So any inspector can say I want to see t I only ask that they put it back where they found it and don'take it out of the office. They're very good about that by the way. But t So it's pretty simple, it's just real simple. Here at Black Earth Meats, what our focus has been and what we've accomplished is scaling up our entire operation. So we have a full production capacity in this plant and we aggregate from a n Thank you for coming on t You can visit us online at www. blackearthmeats. com. Obviously, we'd love to have any of you come and visit us right here in the heart of Black Earth w It took us a full year to renovate the plant and get our systems up and running. It took us another year to train and get the standard operating procedures established. We now have an incredible crew working for us. We're very efficient and we'ready for doing commercial business. We hope you consider us. Thank you very much.

I t Fundamentally, people are stepping up and saying no more. They'rejecting the overly complex system that has created a huge break between capital and labor. That labor is devalued, people are devalued, jobs are devalued, and they're saying no more. And so whether it's Will Allen and growing power working with inner city people who have no money, but are doing urban gardens and growing their own food through cooperative movement, through small scale processors and aggregators, people are standing up and saying, t And that's our future. The primary goal, I think, is the connection with the cons So you have that cons And if you can consolidate that chain, if you can bypass it, that's all great. But the chain is there for a reason and it's understanding what that is, but mostly understanding the relations So if a cons Farmers grow more easily than cons It may sound counterintuitive. There are plenty of people out there who would grow if they had the opportunity and knew what to grow for. Training skills in production, in the processing can happen. There are enough skilled people out there that we can find and train if we have the capital. Training the cons Our critical need is to get the cons

Thank you very much. We really appreciate the work that's been gone into t A lot of people be Lots of responses. We have over 620 people who have contributed. The Kickstarter campaign has been shared thousands of times. We've had national media. It's exciting. From all that, we've raised over $60,000, we are now the most funded food project in Wisconsin in the We're not all the way there yet, so we have some work to go. However, from the publicity and the Kickstarter campaign and all your efforts spreading the word, we have several people who have stepped forward saying, if we get close, if we get it wit So we need to probably double what we have right now. So if we have $60,000, let's get to $125,000. I t We have two locations we're looking at right now. One in the north side of Milwaukee and the We have the ability to move forward if we can pull that is really up to If you're new to there's lots of news media out there, national news. Easy search of Black Earth Meets will give you plenty of stuff about our story, but there's a lot writing on t So let's take it all the way home. Thank you very, very much.