The President of the Cattlemen’s Association calls the closure of the Green Valley Beef Farm in Northern Arm “a huge loss.”
Troy Humber of Green Valley was excited when the opportunity arose to apply for a regional abattoir in Central Newfoundland, but two years later and he has had to lay off staff, shutter a brand new facility and get out of the beef business altogether.
Humber says bureaucratic red tape and the runaround in trying to come up with an acceptable option for waste disposal has him no further ahead, and out $1.2 million dollars of his own money.
His initial proposal, which was accepted, proposed a composting, burying, and trenching model which is used across the province, but, says Humber, that was no longer acceptable.
That’s when he was told to bring the waste to the incinerator on Brookfield Road in St. John’s. The issue with that says Humber is the distance, the fact that the facility can only accommodate an animal or two a week, and it does not have a permit from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency which is the authority on the disposal of Specified Risk Material.
Nelson Fagan of the Cattlemen’s Association has a beef farm and abattoir in CBS. He says most of the beef consumed in Newfoundland and Labrador is trucked in and the province is in need of more abattoirs if the local red meat market is to increase.
He says there are fewer than 30 licenced abattoirs in the province and some of those are for white meat only.
