Concord
New Hampshire House and Senate members are reworking a law that created a state meat inspection program five years ago. So far, however, that program has received no funding through the state budget, and it has never been implemented.
“And here,” House Environment and Agriculture Committee member Rep. Tara Sad said, “we sit.”
Now lawmakers are doing what they can with the language leftovers. This work comes just a month after New Hampshire experienced its first locally farmed beef recall in more than a decade, from the PT Farm slaughtering facility in North Haverhill.
The main intent of the livestock and meat inspection study committee is to revise and clarify the 59-section statute (and to consider things like whether parrots fall under the definition of “poultry”). Committee members also discussed the future of their state meat inspection program.
Passed in 2011, the program was envisioned at a time when local meat producers were hard-pressed to find a federally inspected slaughterhouse.
“Several years ago, we were down to one USDA-inspected facility in the state,” said House Environment and Agriculture Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Haefner.
With demand outpacing slaughtering appointments, farmers were forced to either spend more in travel costs to get to out-of-state slaughterhouses, or they had to pay to care for their animals for several more months as they waited for an opening to have them processed.
Haefner said the issue could potentially have become compounded, too.
“We were worried USDA would start pulling out the inspectors from the small meat states,” he said.
The state inspection program was set up to be equal to federal inspection regulations and to be overseen by the state veterinarian. It would apply to federally defined livestock (cattle, sheep, swine or goats) and associated meat products sold within New Hampshire. State-inspected meat could be sold out of state only with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s permission.
None of this has happened yet. Instead, more USDA-certified slaughterhouses popped up in New Hampshire starting in 2012, when PT Farm moved to North Haverhill from St. Johnsbury, Vt.
Four USDA facilities now operate across the state. No funding has been appropriated toward the state meat inspection program.
Sad said funding isn’t likely anytime soon, either.
“We would never ever be able to get the money to put into the bill to set up the bureaucracy needed,” she said. With that initial startup funding — around $2 million — the program is designed to be self-sustaining in the long run with user fees and funds collected by the state’s department of agriculture.
Even with a fully operational state meat inspection program, members of the study committee weren’t so sure more slaughterhouses would be coming into town. Though new facilities might alleviate the existing USDA slaughterhouses during the peak season in the fall and farmers tend to like state regulators as opposed to federal ones, lawmakers admitted no amount of legislation can create slaughterhouse entrepreneurs.
The study committee acknowledged that their charter is to fix the livestock and meat inspection legislation. Committee members decided to leave the yet-to-be funded state meat inspection program provisions in the statute and then turned to what they could immediately change.
New Hampshire’s livestock and meat laws use phrases taken from the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, and some provisions are confusing, contradictory or unintentionally restrictive.
As an example, House Environment and Agriculture Committee member Rep. Peter Bixby said that, while driving six young chickens from a Strafford, N.H., farm to his house, he suddenly realized he was breaking a provision of the law written in 1985. Even though driving home chickens from Agway, Blue Seal or a local farm is common practice, technically people need a license in New Hampshire to transport animals intended for food.
“Farmers transporting their own livestock are exempt,” Bixby said, “but I’m not.”
Haefner agreed this was an issue and said to the room jokingly, “in the meantime, would you call the state police up here?”
At the study committee’s second meeting last week, Bixby brought an annotated copy of the statute and went through section by section. He highlighted questions such as whether the wording about horses in the statute’s “meat products” definition would present issues with the animal welfare community.
The provision indicates that meat from horses will be treated in a comparable way to meat from cattle, sheep, swine or goats when it comes to how New Hampshire regulates its meat food products.
“Do we want the state to be on record saying that horse meat is in the same category as others?” Bixby asked.
Committee members argued both ways — that the state doesn’t want horse meat in the same category, but food establishments in New Hampshire shouldn’t be banned from using horse meat if they choose, either.
The committee consulted state veterinarian Steve Crawford and Rob Johnson of the New Hampshire Farm Bureau Federation, however, and both said the language was verbatim from federal law.
“Leave them in,” Crawford said.
Also under the definitions section, Bixby asked whether the phrase ‘poultry’ “means any domesticated bird, whether alive or dead,” was specific enough.
“Domesticated birds like canaries and parrots and chickens and emus — do we want to do something, like change it to any bird domesticated for food use?” Bixby asked.
“Would anybody really mistake that for a parrot?” Haefner asked in reply.
“At $3,000 a piece,” Rep. John O’Connor added.
The study committee will finish reviewing the statute and make its recommendations in a report to be submitted by Nov. 1.