Cambridge farmer expands into meat processing in Granite State

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by News & Citizen on September 19.

After surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark Boyden was nearly forced to leave the beef industry.

The Cambridge farmer left the family business around the turn of the century and began breeding cattle a few years later. In the early years, he made deliveries in his own truck with the air conditioning on full blast.

A few decades later, Boyden Beef had found its way into stores and hamburger restaurants throughout the region. Boyden developed a good relationship with Vermont slaughterhouses and meatpackers by providing a reliable supply of cattle year-round, rather than sending them to slaughter during the peak season from September to January, as some other ranchers did.

The pandemic changed all that.

The supply chain came under severe strain as outbreaks of the Covid virus in some of the largest meatpacking plants cast an unfavorable light on the country’s consolidated food supply chain. As meat became more expensive, more people turned to higher-quality, locally raised animals, and more farmers turned to cattle to meet demand.

Slaughtering is the easy, quick part, Boyden said. Disassembling and packaging the animal takes time and skilled labor. The rising demand has put more pressure on Vermont’s nine meatpacking plants, two of which are inspected by the state and seven of which are federally overseen, according to the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont.

According to the “slaughterhouse project,” which supports the creation of more processing plants in Vermont, NOFA claimed that current processors were “nearly at maximum capacity, with farmers reserving slaughter sites 18 months in advance.”

Competition from an increasingly consolidated and monopolized meat production and processing sector leaves small producers like Boyden with few options.

Brazil-born JBS is the world’s largest processor of beef and pork, slaughtering more than 76,000 cattle a day, the company says. It rose to power in its native country on the back of a massive bribery scandal, the Wall Street Journal reports, and a $20 billion international takeover campaign, the New York Times reports, both of which went unchallenged by the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Just before Christmas 2021, the Lyndonville meatpacker that slaughtered Boyden’s cows abruptly closed its doors to him. The relationship became increasingly fraught, and Boyden said food safety issues arose over the way the meat was processed.

He found a new processor two hours from his farm, just across the border in North Haverhill, New Hampshire. Less than a year later, the owner of the plant and the adjacent farm died.

Boyden saw an opportunity to strengthen the long-term sustainability of his beef business in an increasingly competitive and expensive industry, and he seized it. He named his new slaughterhouse and meat processing facility MontShire Farms in recognition of his cross-border operations, and his largest customer was now Boyden Beef.

“I saw an opportunity here and it was kind of a calculated risk, but that’s what you do in business,” Boyden said.

Expansion

The facility Boyden bought was exactly the kind of facility the federal government and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack wanted to support with billions of dollars in new subsidies.

“When I bought this I knew there was a good chance I would get a subsidy because they had already announced that there would be subsidy in the future,” said Boyden.

In addition to MontShire’s direct-to-market store and sales offices, a large warehouse area surrounds a smaller, enclosed facility where cows and pigs are first slaughtered, butchered and processed into marketable parts. Earlier this month, Boyden discussed measurements with an employee and a contractor as they prepared to triple the facility’s capacity.

This expansion is funded by a $2.1 million local meat capacity grant, one of 33 recipients that received a portion of the $26 million distributed nationwide through the program. In the grant description, the USDA identified MontShire as “the largest fee-for-service processing facility” in New Hampshire and one of three still in operation.

Currently, the facility processes about 50 cows and nearly as many pigs each week. However, Boyden anticipates that the facility will eventually become exclusively beef-based. This means that after the expansion, MontShire could process about 300 animals per week.

The New Hampshire Executive Council also contributed $200,000 in grant money to help cover the cost of some very expensive new machinery to facilitate the expansion. But Boyden said the fact that his processing plant is just across the border has contributed to its success.

“The New Hampshire Department of Agriculture said to me, ‘We’re not going to give you anything, but we’re going to make it easy to do business,’ and I can live with that,” Boyden said. “I’m afraid we have a lot of the mindset in Vermont that instead of government trying to work with business, government is there to regulate business and be the first to hammer it.”

Boyden also praised the culture of New Hampshire residents, who he said are more focused on creating jobs than on complaints about odors or noise. Boyden sold some of his land and now grows only feed for his own cows after a Vermont Agency of Agriculture-approved program to use treated human waste on his fields drew such a fierce backlash from neighbors that he quickly ended the practice in 2021.

Boyden, however, is no fan of every aspect of free live or die, and said the two states can learn from each other. He pointed to the Granite State’s exorbitant energy costs, among the most expensive in the country, and New Hampshire’s inability to bring costs down by encouraging free-market economics rather than Vermont’s more hands-on regulatory approach. More grant money will fund 240 solar panels in one of his fields, which will help cover that cost.

While the federal government has subsidized MontShire’s expansion, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to a processor like JBS, which has received more than $900 million in government contracts and $67 million in bailout funds, according to the New York Times. Leading food industry analyst Austin Frerick described Vilsack’s new funding of small slaughterhouses as “dumping a billion dollars into Ask Jeeves and wishing it good luck against Google.”

Yet it keeps Boyden going.

“Of course I’m very biased, I’m a recipient, but this is an example of the government working with companies with a vision and making it work, and not just throwing money away,” he said.

It may be in New Hampshire, but Boyden pointed out that most of the fat-marbled carcasses hanging in the cold room were born in Vermont and spent most of their lives grazing on the hills there.

“Boyden Farm is still in Vermont, and I’ll tell you most of the cattle we have here are from Vermont,” he said. “I’d say three-quarters, if not more, of all the cattle hanging in the bunker are from Vermont.”