Country meats INC. Is a state-inspected, family-owned meat slaughter and processing plant in the ruralcommunity of arcadia, iowa

Country Meats Inc. received a $200,000 Project Grant award from the US Department of Agriculture Agricultural Marketing Service under the Meat and Poultry Inspection Readiness Grants – Supplemental Funding program. The award will support facility upgrades and process improvements to enable Country Meats to become a cooperative interstate shipment facility. Specifically, the funding will remodel the freezer to expand storage capacity by 20%, upgrade the slaughterroom to double capacity to 34 cattle and 16 hogs weekly, rebuild the processing room with increased space and compliant materials to allow a 1.2 million pound annual processing increase, and install a water tower for 672 additional processing hours of utility interruption coverage. The grant will also finance consultation on compliance and planning. These upgrades are intended to generate $4.5 million in new sales and create 6 jobs over the three-year period ending September 2024.

We look to become a cooperative interstate shipment facility. We offerslaughter and processing of custom, retail, official cooking, and wholesale products. We process ABOUT950,000 pounds for custom services and 325,000 pounds per year of state official inspected products, which are sourced from ~850 unique farmers.while we have potential to positively impact the midwestern food supply, we need to make keyimprovements to join the CIS program. We propose remodeling our freezer to expand storage capacity BY20 percent and improve food temperature stability. We also will make upgrades to expand our slaughterroom, which will help US maintain fsis compliance, while doubling our slaughter capacity to 34 beef cattleand 16 hogs weekly. We also intend to rebuild our processing room with increased space and fsiscompliant materials and design to ensure we can meet standards and increase processing volume by 1.2MILLION pounds during the grant period. To ensure we are able to maintain fsis compliant slaughter andprocessing during regular utility interruptions, we will invest in a water tower that will increase ourprocessing capacity by 672 man hours during the grant period. Finally, we will hire a meat processingconsultant to counsel our facility on fsis compliance and plan development. We expect to generate $4.5MILLION in new sales during the grant period and create 6 new jobs.