Johnston’s Meat Market is more than just a butcher shop and retail store in Monticello, Florida: It is a proud local institution with a century-long legacy. 

One hundred years ago, Felix and Alice Johnston founded the market when most families lacked refrigeration. Johnston’s offered meat locker rentals to local residents and quickly became a trusted source for locally produced meat. For more than 98 years, three generations of the Johnston family carefully managed and grew the business, serving beef, lamb, and goat producers throughout a three-state region with USDA-inspected processing.

The mood was festive on August 5th as local dignitaries, cooperative development leaders, USDA’s State Rural Development Director, and Flower Hill Institute's Regional Directors joined Puerto Rican farmers beneath two tents offering shade from the searing sun on a hilltop in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico.

The occasion: the grand reopening of the Puerto Rico Meat Processing Center, acquired earlier this year by Cooperativa de Porcicultores de Puerto Rico, a cooperative owned by more than 70 hog producers in the region.

Dave Carter, regional TA provider director for Flower Hill Institute's USDA Meat & Poultry Processing Technical Assistance program, discusses current efforts to support small processors at the American Association of Meat Processors annual meeting in Milwaukee, WI.

The aging of America's agricultural population has been a growing concern for decades. The average farmer is now over 58 years old. Rural businesses, likewise, are suffering as one generation retires with no one following behind.

Anyone ready to throw in the towel on the future of young people in rural communities should attend an American Association of Meat Processors (AAMP) convention for a jolt of optimism.  

AAMP bills its annual gathering as a family affair. That’s no overstatement.

Developing a small meat processing facility probably isn’t what the average person would envision for post-retirement. Dave Endicott didn’t envision it either.

Yet, five years after stepping down from a career in higher education, he is overseeing the grand opening of a new processing facility established by Minnesota Farmers Union Foundation in Staples, MN.

Dave spent 30 years in K-12 and higher education, culminating as the Dean at Central Lakes College in Staples, MN. There, he developed a Meat Cutting and Butchery Program to address the need for skilled professionals to replace the aging butcher workforce in the upper Midwest.

It began with a 15-liter hand-cranked stuffer. 

That’s where Maarten Van Zoeren of Simla Frozen Food Locker in southeastern Colorado pins the birth of his meat processing business.

Maarten came to the United States in 1990 at the age of 15 when his parents immigrated from the Netherlands to the small eastern Colorado community of Simla. They bought a frozen food locker there and began processing local meat.

Someone once said, “Meat processing isn’t rocket science; it’s more difficult.”

Smaller meat processors have certainly been navigating challenges in recent years that would vex the brightest aerospace engineers. Coming out of the pandemic, a severe slaughter capacity shortage threatened the viability of many ranchers. Then, just as more slaughter capacity began to emerge, Mother Nature brought on a drought that—along with screwworm and other factors—has reduced the nation’s cattle herd to the lowest level in more than a decade. And byproduct disposal is a persistent problem that keeps smaller processors at a competitive disadvantage.