This Little Piggy Goes Home

A kinder, gentler, and more convenient abattoir.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


“here, piggy piggy,” calls the man peering through the early-morning fog into a livestock trailer, a .22-caliber rifle in his hands. It is 7 a.m. in farm country outside Santa Rosa, California. A rooster crows. “Here we go. Right here.”

He raises the rifle to his shoulder and takes aim. BAM! There’s a thud, and a few excited squeals from the remaining pigs behind the bars. Carefully, the man sets down the gun and steps into the trailer. He emerges dragging a small, dead—but still twitching—reddish pig with a bullet hole the diameter of a pencil eraser just about perfectly centered in its forehead.

Meet John Taylor, or “One Shot Johnny,” as his customers call him. His business card offers just “JT’s Custom Slaughtering” and his cell phone number, along with clip art of a cow, pig, sheep, and lamb. But then, he doesn’t really need a card. Just about everyone in California north of San Francisco who raises animals for meat knows the tall “ranch butcher” with the bristly mustache and straight-arrow demeanor of a frontier sheriff. Now 43, he began sweeping floors in his family’s butcher shop (since sold) in third grade, and started helping his uncle in the pasture not long after. “I was doomed—I knew this was what I was meant to do,” he says.

Taylor ties on a black rubber apron that hangs past the tops of his rubber boots and chains a knife holder around his waist. He sticks a hook through the animal’s lower jaw and attaches it to a winch mounted on his truck. Twenty minutes of expert scraping, shaving, and eviscerating later, the pig has become pork.

The trailer belongs to Brock Fulmer, of Black Sheep Farm near Potter Valley, California, who’s hauled three swine 90 minutes south from his farm and paid $50 per head to have them slaughtered on this dead-end road outside a friend’s property. Fulmer could have paid just $20 per head at a usda-inspected facility two hours’ drive east of his farm, but that would have required booking a slot at least a month ago. And the customer who bought these pigs for a barbecue didn’t think that far ahead.

“Besides, J.T.’s the best there is,” says Fulmer. “He’s like a ninja.”

Marksmanship is important, but so is legal savvy, since a single misstep could land Taylor in hot water. By California law, he can slaughter livestock only for a farmer’s personal use or for a farmer’s customer who buys the animal alive and whole; in the latter case, he has to do so off farm premises. And under federal law, every carcass Taylor delivers to a butcher shop for cutting—and every piece from it—must be stamped “Not for Sale.” Only meat from usda-inspected slaughterhouses can be sold across state lines or on a retail basis (including at farmers markets and restaurants) in the 25 states without their own inspection systems, like California and New York. Taylor has something of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with his farmers—if Taylor knew his clients were going to sell the meat he shot and officials found out, he could be liable for any food-borne illnesses, for example.

Such rules are partly why federally inspected slaughterhouses kill 98 percent of all cattle and 99 percent of hogs in this country. But as giants like Tyson and Smithfield Foods—which have their own abattoirs—have increasingly dominated the meat industry, the number of usda-approved slaughterhouses nationwide has fallen, from 1,405 in 1992 to just 808 in 2008. (Wyoming doesn’t have a single one.) In 2007, just 14 plants killed 18.5 million cattle, more than half the country’s total; that’s a per-slaughterhouse average of 2.5 head per minute, 24-7. These big operations “are not talking to the little guy, the farmer who says, ‘I have 500 head of beef‘”—let alone 50 or 5, says Bruce Dunlop, who raises lamb and pork on Lopez Island in Washington state. “They laugh at him.” Nor is the little guy excited to take his animals to the plant, considering the very real possibility that they will be mistreated (see the 2007 scandal involving workers at a Chino, California, facility who sprayed water up the noses of lame cattle to get them to walk to slaughter, as required by law, and moved those that couldn’t walk by forklift), or that their meat will be caught in the net of a massive E. coli-driven recall.

In desperation, farmers are going into the abattoir business themselves. In 2002, Dunlop, who worked as an engineer before raising sheep, headed a group of farmers who funded, designed, and built a usda-approved mobile slaughterhouse unit that now serves Washington state’s four northwest counties. A 34-foot trailer with a cooler and a water system, it dispatches up to 10 cattle a day, four days a week. Dunlop has sold six similar units for about $175,000 each to ranchers around the country. Joel Salatin, whose Polyface farm starred in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is thinking bigger: In July, with a partner, he bought a small usda-inspected slaughterhouse in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

But smaller slaughterhouses are struggling mightily to stay in business. The initial investment is steep and the payoff slow if you’re not processing thousands of head each day. It takes a minimum of $2 million to build a new plant or even overhaul an old one, says Mike Lorentz, who built a 30-head-a-day facility in 1999 in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. “We lost a million dollars in the first three years. I am like a cancer survivor—exhilarated that I survived, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

So into the breach steps One Shot Johnny. Booked solid six days a week, he hasn’t taken a sick day in more than seven years, since he impaled his hand skinning a lamb. Small farms in Northern California are raising ever more animals, but all the area’s ranch butchers have retired; Taylor recently trained one other man, but he kills only a few days a week for a small number of clients. “Sure, my back hurts a lot,” Taylor says. “But what am I going to do, cancel on people? This is their livelihood at stake.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate