granddaughter, sydney adams, and her team

just before christmas in 2006 the adams family’s plans and their business literally went up in flames. since then, they have rebuilt from the ground up with design help from dr. temple grandin. a thoughtfully designed, humane system that takes the animals through the slaughtering process. by margaret leroux

THE ADAMS FAMILYAND THEIR FARM

dams Farm is no ordinary slaughterhouse; that’s apparenteven from its location. Perched on a hill outside the town ofAthol in north central Massachusetts, the farm’s parking lot

offers a picture-postcard view of the Pioneer Valley. On a clear day, inthe distance you can see with Mount Greylock in the Berkshires andMount Monadnock in New Hampshire.

Adams Farm is a family-run operation and has been for three gen-erations. The farm was purchased by the late Lewis Adams in 1945;today his son Rick, daughter Noreen Heath and their mother, BeverlyAdams Mundell, are co-owners. Rick and Noreen’s children are activein the business.

What makes Adams Farm outstanding, however, is not quite so sce-nic but much more important to the animals it handles and customerswho buy meat. It’s the thoughtfully designed, humane system thattakes the animals through the slaughtering process. The holding pensand one-way chute system at Adams Farm were designed by Dr. Tem-ple Grandin, the world’s leading authority in the humane handling ofmeat animals.

“The essence of it is a good flow of animals through the system tominimize stress,” said Ed Maltby, Adams Farm’s general manager.When cows, pigs, lambs or goats arrive at Adams’ loading dock, theyare guided through the chutes leading to holding pens. The pens arebedded with straw and water is available at all times. If they are beingheld overnight, the animals are fed.

Both the size and materials used for the pens are considerations inthe humane treatment of the animals processed at Adams Farm. Thepens are made of steel rather than wood; Maltby explains that an ani-mal could be injured if wood splinters.

“With the wear and tear they get it’s safer for the animals, though alot more expensive. We put in the steel pens just when the price ofsteel went through the roof,” he noted ruefully.

“There was a lot of thought put into the entire process,” Maltbycontinued. “Our goal is to make it stress-free for the animals. It’s bet-ter for them and it results in a better product for the customers.”

One of Grandin’s requirements (as well as a requirement of build-ing codes) is that the holding pen area must be level. Adams Farm ison a steep hill, which presented a formidable challenge in construction.

“We needed to put down a huge amount of gravel—45,000 cubicyards—to make the base level,” Maltby said. Rick Adams operated theexcavator taking gravel from two different sites on the farm property.Other family members and friends trucked and leveled the materialover a six-month period while the financing for their new facility wascompleted.

From the holding pens animals are guided, two or three at a time,through another series of chutes. The walls of the chutes are solid sothere’s nothing to distract them. The floors are kept clean of anythingthat might give the animals reason to pause. A series of gates separatethe chutes so animals enter the final destination, the restraint box, oneat a time. It’s swift and efficient, less than one minute from the timeof entry into the chute to being hung for cleaning after slaughter.

All along the way, from loading dock to the cooler where meat ishung, the emphasis is on care, cleanliness and dignity.

“If you give animals the opportunity, they’ll do the right thing 99%of the time,” said Maltby. “It’s our duty to deal with them respectfully.”

Within seconds after an animal is killed, the carcass is hoisted ontoa hook. It travels on a track through the harvesting room where the

hide and other non-edible parts are taken off the animal and stored fordifferent uses. The hide is removed—sold to a local company; pricesfor hides vary according to the world market. The cleaned guts andother parts are sold to a rendering plant.

“We try to maximize the return on every part,” Maltby said. The an-imal carcass is weighed electronically, trimmed of any excess material,washed, then split in half. Before the track takes the carcass into thecooler, the USDA inspector checks it and stamps it.

The harvesting and packaging rooms are cleaned daily; they have topass USDA inspection first thing in the morning before any of the day’soperations begin.

“We show respect both for the animal and the carcass,” Maltby said.“And we respect the USDA rules and regulations.” Adams Farm is aUSDA-certified slaughterhouse; the facility is also certified organic,halal and kosher. Adams’ staff follows USDA guidelines for HazardAnalysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP). A USDA inspector ison site daily to oversee the slaughtering, conditioning and fabricationprocess.

Rick Adams’ daughter, Sydney, supervises the harvesting room. Oneof Noreen’s daughters, Chelsea, is the bookkeeper, human resource co-ordinator and office manager; another daughter, Melissa is learning theretail operation and buys produce for sale in the store, adjacent to thefarm. There, a variety of cuts of meat from Adams’ own herd of cows isavailable in addition to local cheese and vegetables.

The number of women among staff and managers also makes Adamsstand out from others in the industry. Noreen supervises the retail store,the fabrication and cutting room, as well as smoking of meats. She alsokeeps track of scheduling when farmers can bring animals to be slaugh-tered and monitors and updates the HACCP plan. Four of her staffmembers are women.

Noreen noted the difficulty of finding experienced meat cutters. “Thefew who come with any training have learned specialty cuts; however,we focus on getting the most from every carcass. We scrape down to thebone; there’s no waste, ” she said. The most important thing about meatcutting is being careful. Noreen quotes her brother, Rick: “Keep youreye on your knife and you won’t cut your fingers.”

All of Adams Farm’s meat cutters receive on-the-job training the sameway Noreen did. She was 10 when her father died and she learned thebusiness “watching and pitching in.” Noreen didn’t really make a careerchoice of supervising the cutting room; “it was just a matter of, if I did-n’t do it no one else would.”

Keeping track of each individual customer’s preferences is Noreen’sspecialty. “No two people want their meat cut the same way. The mostimportant thing is to make my customers happy. I know what theywant,” she said. “The biggest challenge is getting everything done whenthe customer wants it. Some want their meat hung for a week, othersfor 21 days. Most meat goes out frozen, but some restaurant clients pre-fer fresh meat, so that goes out the same day the animal is slaughtered.”

This careful handling and attention to detail made Adams Farm a nat-ural fit for Greyledge Farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, says owner TerryFitzgerald. His pasture-raised, all-natural Black Angus beef cattle andheritage-breed pigs and lambs are processed by Adams every two orthree weeks.

“We interviewed and inspected slaughterhouses in three differentstates before electing to work with Adams Farm,” Fitzgerald said. “Thedifferentiated experience at Adams Farm for our animals ensures the

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quality of our finished beef, lamb and pork.” The treatment his animalsreceive at Adams “more than offset the incremental cost and effort totransport our animals 70 miles farther than alternative slaughterhouses,”Fitzgerald said.

He also noted that Adams Farm “is without equal in terms of theirsensitivity to the humane treatment of our animals. Their hygienic stan-dards complement our commitment to quality.” Greyledge Farm’s beefis dry-aged for 20 days, another special treatment available for cus-tomers of Adams Farm.

Vacuum-sealed clear packaging is an option selected for most of themeat processed at Adams Farm. It’s yet another indicator of quality de-manded by discerning retail customers.

From August to February Adams Farm is busy nonstop. “We’re try-ing to educate our customers to stagger their slaughter appointments,”Maltby explains. “We’re fully booked from August 2011 through Feb-ruary 2012, but we can’t afford to run this as a seasonal business.”

Scheduling their customers is the latest in a series of challenges theAdams family has overcome. Beverly and her husband, Lewis, startedthe slaughterhouse as an addition to their dairy farm in 1946. “It grewby leaps and bounds,” she said. In 1972, just after a major expansion inthe business, Lewis Adams died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage.Beverly was left with five children aged 8 to 16. “Everyone had to pitchin,” she said. “It was hard, but you have to pick yourself up and try tomake life better.”

The family followed her example. The business continued to growwith a third generation of Adamses moving into staff positions. Theybegan planning for another expansion and were working with the Mas-sachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources on financing. Just be-fore Christmas in 2006 the Adams family plans and their businessliterally went up in flames. An electrical fire swept throughout the en-tire facility and destroyed everything.

“I got a call around 11:30 that there was a fire in the office,” saidNoreen who lives about 10 minutes from the farm. From miles away, Icould see the flames. The whole building was engulfed.”

Fortunately, the Adamses’ own animals escaped, but all their cus-tomers’ meat was destroyed. “Because of the coming holidays, we’dworked overtime,” Noreen said. “We had just processed 300 roastingpigs. One of the coolers was full of prime rib roasts.”

The heat was so intense, it melted steel equipment in the cuttingroom. Not even a knife survived. Someone found a dollar bill buried inthe soot on the floor of a cooler. “I stuck it on my refrigerator, the onlything in one piece after the fire,” said Beverly.

“The fire stopped the family dead in their tracks,” Maltby said. Butnot for long. There was never any doubt that the business would con-tinue. “It’s our whole life,” said Noreen.

Maltby, who at the time was a consultant with the MassachusettsFarm Viability Program, worked with the family to get the fundsneeded to resurrect the business. He later joined them as general man-ager.

“Not many financial institutions know anything about slaughter-houses,” he explained. Eventually the family got a Small Business Ad-ministration loan and another loan from a local bank. The state camethrough with some money and the family was able to get funds for cre-ating new jobs. The town of Athol helped with tax benefits. Whatmeant the most to the Adamses, however, was the support they receivedfrom neighbors and customers.

“The day after the fire, people came by to offer help with recon-struction. They also made donations,” Maltby said. “Farmers wrote let-ters to financial institutions stating how important the operation ofAdams Farm was to their own farm business. We had a lot of local sup-port. Not many towns would encourage rebuilding a slaughterhouse,but in Athol, Adams is the second largest employer.”

The fire also was a disaster for Adams’ customers like Carolyn andJohn Wheeler, who raise grass-fed Belted Galloway beef cattle onWheel-View Farm in Shelburne, Massachusetts.

“Adams Farm is 37 miles from our farm, but after the fire shut themdown we were making round trips of 400 miles to several different fa-cilities to have our cows processed,” Carolyn Wheeler said. The longtrips were not only expensive, they also added stress for the animals.

When it became apparent that there would be another Adams Farm,the family planned for a bigger and better facility. The input on designfrom Grandin has been a big plus for the farmers who sell meatprocessed at Adams.

“Our own customers appreciate that our animals are raised andprocessed humanely,” Carolyn Wheeler said.

Adams’ emphasis on humane treatment and quality are among fac-tors that led Mark Kaufman to choose the facility for processing thebeefalo, beef cattle, goats and lamb he raises at Wild Mountain Farm inWest Brookfield, Massachusetts. Kaufman sells his meat at farmers mar-kets in Holden, Springfield and West Brookfield.

“Temple Grandin’s involvement was important to me; so was thefact that Adams is family-owned and -operated,” Kaufman said. “It’snice to be able to talk to the person in charge of the cutting; Adams hasalways stepped up to the plate when I needed them.”

Kaufman raises his animals on 35 scenic acres, the former apple or-chard of a farm established in the 1700s. In addition, he leases 200 acresfrom three neighboring dairy farms. “To see our animals grazing ongrassland that was last used as pasture 40 to 80 years ago is my idea ofprogress,” Kaufman writes on the Wild Mountain Farm website.

Like many of Adams’ small farm customers, Kaufman’s animals arepasture raised without antibiotic feeds or growth hormones and mar-keted to the growing niche of locavore customers.

Rebuilt from the ground up, the new Adams Farm is almost threetimes the size of the former facility and has triple the number of em-ployees. Scaling up has been the biggest challenge, Maltby concedes.“Managing growth, dealing with all the regulations that go along withall the certifications we have, we’re here seven days a week.”

Maltby has been involved in agriculture for more than 20 years. Oneof his early experiences was on a farm in Wales where he worked withautistic children. “There’s a natural connection between children andanimals,” he noted. “First the children would learn to feed the chickens,then collect the eggs, then bring the eggs into the kitchen, cook them and eat them. The goal was to make them aware it’s all partof a process.”

The same could be said of the Adams family and their farm, all partof a humane process.

Adams Farm, 854 Bearsden Road, Athol, MA 01331978-249-9441 www.adamsfarm.biz

Margaret LeRoux lives and writes in Central Massachusetts, where anabundance of locally available meat keeps her backyard grill in operationyear round. You can read more of her articles at www.margaretleroux.com.

L to R: granddaughter melissa frost, grandma beverly mundell, granddaughter chelsea frost, daughter noreen heath