ANOTHER OPTION TO GET YOUR BEEF

Bill would allow people to buy meat directly from the producer without involving a USDA inspection.

Colorado is about to let meat eaters buy steaks and pork chops directly from the producer, without involving an inspection from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It’ll cost you upfront in the form of buying a share of the animal before it’s butchered, and you can’t sue the producer if you get sick.

Rural Coloradans have been buying shares of meat from each other for years, but lawmakers want to expand it to the rest of the state — and mandate that producers make it clear to consumers that the meat has not been federally inspected.

Sponsors of the bill — which unanimously passed the House and Senate but needs a final vote after some small changes before it’s sent to Gov. Jared Polis — say it’s a chance to make locally sourced meat more available.

They also said it’s in response to the bottleneck in meat production that happened during the pandemic. Some large meatpacking plants had to shut down or scale back production because of COVID outbreaks, which led to higher prices and less meat on grocery store shelves. And Colorado’s ranchers, who were seeing high levels of interest in their meat, had trouble keeping up with the demand and scheduling butchering in USDA-inspected meat plants.

“When we saw grocery stores that didn’t have food, and we had people wanting to have access to meat and meat products as well as other foods, I started looking into how do I make it easier for a producer to be able to sell their meat directly to a consumer,” said GOP Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling, a rancher himself.

Colorado isn’t the first to allow these types of direct sales: Wyoming passed a similar law last year, expanding a 2015 law to include beef. Colorado’s bill is modeled on Wyoming’s and is similar to the Colorado Cottage Foods Act, which allows things such as pickled fruits and vegetables to be sold directly to consumers without inspections or licensing.

Mark Gallegos, deputy director of the Inspection and Consumer Services Division at the Colorado Department of Agriculture, said the bill is really more of a clarification than a full-bore change to the state’s Custom Meat Act, so it’s clear what the requirements are for buying meat directly from a producer.

When it comes to safety, there’s always a risk any time there’s not a robust process for inspections, testing and surveillance, Jennifer Martin of Colorado State University’s Center for Meat Safety and Quality said.

“It does create some concern

for that, that this bill opens the window of opportunity for unsafe food to enter the marketplace,” she said, noting that the U.S. has a history of a safe food supply.

Martin also said it’s important to ensure that resources are available to small processors who want to implement their own safety measures as many did last year, especially as more people buy their meat this way.

How it would work

Meat that’s already been butchered and packaged — such as at a grocery store or a farmer’s market — must be federally inspected. That would not change under the bill.

And currently in Colorado, a person who owns cattle, hogs, sheep, bison, goats or rabbits can have the animal slaughtered and share that meat with family and friends without it needing to be butchered in a USDAinspected plant.

The bill would make it clear that any consumer in Colorado can get meat this way as long as they buy a share in the animal while it is still alive. The person who buys a share cannot sell the meat to someone else.

Chicken and fish aren’t part of this bill (although smaller producers can already do this with chicken if they sell 1,000 or fewer a year).

Republican bill sponsor Rep. Rod Pelton of Cheyenne Wells believes the bill would help solve a few problems.

“It is a win for ag producers and consumers,” he said in a statement. “Consumers can buy top-quality meat products from producers that care for their land and animals with the best practices that benefit the environment and consumers in a positive way.”

Delta County rancher Jason Wrich, who raises grass-fed cattle, processed double the meat than planned last year but had to scramble to find a local processing plant because of the backlog.

He’s partnered with a processor who doesn’t have a USDA facility to sell beef shares through a membership structure. Wrich said it’s been “wildly popular” over the past three months, and, like the bill would require, members must sign a waiver saying they knew it wasn’t USDA-inspected.

The bill would “allow us to offer that high-quality, sustainably raised meat to more people at a reduced cost,” Wrich said. “It would have a tremendous impact.”

Safety and legality

Bill sponsors worked with the USDA and the Colorado Department of Agriculture to make sure their plan was feasible, Sonnenberg said.

Jackson Collier, a public affairs specialist with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said in a statement: “We look forward to working with the state of Colorado, as we do with any state, to ensure meat, poultry, and egg products are safe for human consumption.”

The state health department will continue to inspect the several dozen processing plants that aren’t under the USDA’s eye for things like listeria and E.coli. However, Colorado does not have a state inspection program for meat that is equivalent to that of the USDA’s, unlike some other states such as Oklahoma and Utah.

As evidenced by the vote counts, Democrats are clearly on board, and Democratic state Rep. Donald Valdez from La Jara is one of the bill sponsors.

“These are small businesses. And in my district, I know about seven of these small business butcher shops, and they were backed up from a year to year and a half,” he said. “And we want it to not only make sure that you can buy your animal from a local farm or producer, your family farms, and go and have it processed locally because you know what you’re getting.”

Former Wyoming GOP state Rep. Tyler Lindholm, who came up with the idea for Wyoming’s law, said consumers have to jump through hoops to buy local beef that don’t necessarily apply to other meat under federal guidelines, so these types of bills are a way to address that.

“This is about the consumer and providing the opportunity to be able to enjoy the benefits of local products,” he said.

A key difference between Colorado’s bill and Wyoming’s law: Colorado would prevent a buyer from suing a producer for damages that result from not preparing or cooking the meat properly. Colorado, like Wyoming, would require that producers provide buyers with a disclaimer.

“The idea here is that the consumer and the producer have a personal relationship,” Sonnenberg said, “so you know where your livestock is coming from, and you’re comfortable the way I raise the livestock and you’re comfortable with the processing plant.”

In a committee hearing, bill backers said the disclaimer protects the consumer buying the share as well as the producer who shouldn’t be held responsible if someone else didn’t handle the meat correctly.

Lindholm commended Colorado, though he disagreed with removing the ability to sue, and noted there have been neither an influx of lawsuits nor foodborne-illness outbreaks from the producer-to-consumer sales in Wyoming.