 My name is Robert Maddock, I'm a meat scientist in the Department of Animal Sciences at NDSU and today I'm going to talk a little bit about people who have a lot of interest now in selling meat from home and local food processing. So we're here at the NDSU meats lab and I'm just going to go through some important things you're going to need to consider if you want to start selling meat from your home or from a small processing plant. And there's really three big things that we need to consider and the first one is inspection. So this is an inspected product and here at the NDSU meats lab we are federally inspected and there are several levels of inspection but for the most part there's federal, there's state and then there's exempt and we are a federally inspected processing plant which means that any sort of slaughter and processing we can do, we can ship product anywhere in the country. North Dakota has state inspection which is equivalent to federal, only all the product has to be sold within the state boundaries of North Dakota and that doesn't mean somebody can't come from Minnesota and buy your product but as long as the transaction takes place in North Dakota that's fine. The third level is custom exempt and custom exempt means that the slaughter and the processing did not take place under inspection and so that product has to go back to the person who owns the animal. Now the nice thing about this is if you're a beef cow producer, you've got pigs or sheep or any sort of livestock that you can actually sell the animal to the person and then they can have it processed and get the meat back. So that's the exempt but what limits you on that from like a home based business is if animals are slaughtered and processed under custom exempt you can't resell the meat. So if you have a plan that you want to try and resell some meat, you want to have some freezers or some refrigerators around, we're going to try and sell meat in a retail or in a farmer's market off the farm, you better have it inspected. The second thing we really want to talk about then is finding a processor that can do this. Unfortunately in North Dakota we're kind of limited in processors and if you're a livestock or a producer you probably know that it's hard to get things scheduled. We've talked a lot of processors, they're scheduled in the next year already for beef and pigs. So finding a processor is pretty important, again an inspected processor is great, custom exempt would work and if you go to like the North Dakota Department of Ag website they have a list of all the processors and hopefully you maybe know some of your area and there's a lot of interest in increasing processing capacity as well so maybe another topic for later. The third thing you really got to consider then is marketing, especially for beef. You have to sell the whole animal. When we talk about selling beef a lot of people really want to talk about oh we've got ribeye steaks and t-bones, we've got some burgers we can sell, you've got to remember there's a lot of roast, there's potentially got a lot of fat and bone you have to consider, plus the cost of processing. So to make this make sense you know you've got to plan to sell your product for quite a bit of money but recent survey we did talk to quite a few processors in North Dakota. The process and package of beef is the cost is approaching $1,000 in most places so the time you add the processing cost to the cost of the animal and you start selling meat you got to really consider that that meat gets pretty expensive and so you have to do really good job marketing. You have to have people that want to buy your product and often times you suggest that before you take animals into process you should have most of that sold before you even take that otherwise you're going up with freezers and freezers full of meat that hang around for a time that you end up losing money on. Now one of the final questions we get is can I actually do this? Yes, if you have inspected product either state or federally inspected product you can set up freezers or refrigerators probably freezers in your garage, in your house and you can actually serve as a retail outlet for that so you can sell meat retail from your farm from your house from your garage however you do have to have a retail license probably from your local health department or regional health unit and while you're not fully inspected they are going to make you have some things like you can't have your product and the retail product mixed together you have to have discrete freezers or refrigerators only again only inspected product and has to maintain that level of inspection and you can't do any processing once it leaves the processing facility for example you can't decide on when I've got a grinder at home I'm going to grind up some of this stuff and sell the meat you're not allowed to do that because you've taken it out and you've processed it without the benefit of inspection. So again kind of to sum up on some big things make sure you've got the level of inspection that you need again for retail sales you're not going to have state or federal inspection make sure you've got a good marketing plan and make sure that you're working with a processor that can get you scheduled in and do the things that you need for them to do.