State grant gives Minnesota students the chops for meat processing

NINA MOINI: A state grant is helping Minnesota schools teach meat processing to students. Applications are now open for the appropriately named MEAT grant, which stands for Meat Education and Training. In the first round of grants, $350,000 was dispersed across nine districts to establish or enhance meat cutting and butchery training. One of those districts was West Central Schools. That's located in Grant County, just south of Fergus Falls. Eric Sawatzke is the high school agriculture teacher and FFA advisor there and joins me on the line now. Thanks so much for taking the time today, Eric.

ERIC SAWATZKE: Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: I'm so glad that we have you. Many of us might have a local butcher or not even think, really, about how we get the meat that we're getting. I'm curious to know how you got into meat processing education.

ERIC SAWATZKE: Yeah. Long story short, my dad did a little bit of schooling at Pipestone meat school back in the '70s. And so when we were on our dairy farm, he had the equipment, and I was always doing some cutting here and there with some of our animals as a kid. And then as an ag teacher, I'm 18 years into this.

And the last couple of years as a farmer as well, we saw the constrictions of the meat processing plants during the COVID pandemic, and so we were really struggling to find places to send our animals. My two lives of education and livestock production came together, and it was just time for us to train in the high schools and get kids excited about a pathway that we haven't been showcasing at the high school level recently.

NINA MOINI: That's great. So you helped create the grant. How was the grant process?

ERIC SAWATZKE: Yeah. We, in 2022, got the legislature involved and put together the first grant, and then Department of Agriculture released it. For our school, as an example, we already had a facility set up to be able to do the cutting, and the problem was we had a freezer for holding our frozen meat in a large volume we'd want to have, but we didn't want that to go bad, of course, because this is a food product.

And so for us, we needed a backup generator that the school didn't have the funds to add additionally to their backup, and so we applied for that specifically. And very cordial grant program and grant staff at the Department of Agriculture worked with us to think about what works best as we went through the application process. And then we've now had that generator in place for a little over a year now, and it's been great to back up, just in case-- the weather of Minnesota, you never know what's going to happen and potentially cause a shutdown of power for us. And we know our meat is still going to be safe.

NINA MOINI: Absolutely. That's really great. What would you say the overall goal is for the grant and in helping to educate more high schoolers?

ERIC SAWATZKE: First and foremost, it's awareness, of course. We need to know how our food is produced and processed. But then the next level is, can we alleviate the stress level on the industry in general? There's ways to do it by, of course, getting kids excited about maybe a career in cutting meat, but that's not the largest group that we're going to hit. It's going to be that kid that maybe realizes, hey, I could buy wholesale and cut down my steaks, or cut down my pork chops out of a pork loin and save a little bit of that labor and the cost for myself and my family, too.

Or you might have that kid that's an avid outdoorsman and wants to prepare their own venison instead of sending their deer into a processor. Every one of those animals that doesn't go into a local butcher shop helps to reduce the workload of the butcher shops that are overwhelmed with so many of those baby boomers retiring now and nobody coming in and taking over those plants in a lot of the small towns.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Tell me more about that. I was curious to know how much interest there is among young people into entering the career path of meat processing or being a butcher.

ERIC SAWATZKE: I think the biggest restriction so far is a lack of knowing how to. I think they believe that everything requires a certification or a degree, and that's not the case. You can go right into butcher work, because you can get a facility that's inspected by the Department of Agriculture, get something like a custom exempt or an equal to USDA inspection permit through the department of Eggs, Meat, and Dairy Inspection Service, and get cutting.

You don't have to go to a college. You don't have to go to a tech school. We do have CLC and Ridgewater College offering programs that you can get a certificate now, which is exciting and new in the last couple of years. But even if you don't do that, you can get started. And I just think that kids didn't know that. And now that ag teachers and family consumer science teachers are thinking about teaching this, we can help them see that path.

NINA MOINI: Absolutely. What are the types of skills that you are teaching the students?

ERIC SAWATZKE: First and foremost is actually food safety. So we start off with HACCP plans and standard operating procedures and, of course, good hygiene and hygiene thinking through the process. The moment I wash my hands and start working with a food product, I have to stay clean. And so if I decide I need to go to the bathroom in the middle of class, I've got to go through the whole cleaning process again. And they recognize now that the food service industry has a lot of food safety procedures that go in place.

We do a little bit of training on how inspection works for the United States Department of Ag and the Minnesota Department of Ag to show how safe our food and our meat systems are. So as consumers, they know that. And then once the cutting starts, it's up to the teacher. So for myself, we buy wholesale cuts, and then we'll break down-- let's say it's a beef, chuck, and we'll show them how to get a flat iron steak out of a beef chuck, and then maybe use the rest for pot roast or ground beef, and how to measure out patties for burgers, and then how to package and wrap.

We have a custom exempt license, so our customers buy ahead of time from us, and then our kids learn the process of how to have a product that can't go on a retail shelf, but can be purchased under that custom exempt, just like your local butcher shop does.

NINA MOINI: OK. Are the students excited when they get started, or what's been their reaction to being in this arena?

ERIC SAWATZKE: Yeah. They were really excited when we first introduced the idea few years ago. It took us a while to get all the facilities and then get inspected and everything, and they were just really chomping at the bit. And so we have a meat processing trailer here at our school. It's a fully outfitted trailer.

And the chant every day-- they chant as they come down to the classroom. They're chanting meat trailer, meat trailer. They're so excited. And they actually begged me to make an advance course, so I actually have a new course this year from kids that took the introductory course. They've just been really excited, and a lot of them say it's the reason they like to come to school. And that's what I like to hear.

NINA MOINI: Oh, I'm so happy to hear that. How about just local farmers in the area? Do they ever come and participate, or are they excited to see a younger generation, really concerted efforts to get a younger generation involved?

ERIC SAWATZKE: Yeah. So the next big step we're working on is we want to be able to get local farmers, livestock producers, and get their animals probably taken to a local butcher shop to be slaughtered and broken down into a portion that we can work with. Maybe it's the front shoulder or something like that, or a loin, and we can do the ribeye cuts or something like that.

And then have that farmer's local beef animal be cut locally, be a training resource for our kids, and then that's still under that custom exempt. So if some local family bought a quarter beef from that farmer, they're still going to get their quarter beef, but they get that extra little boost of support in the community by helping us out. We've got farmers right now that are ready to donate beef, pork, goats, and sheep to our program.

NINA MOINI: That's great. And why is it important to have not only community support and within the kind of agricultural industry and those stakeholders, but also to have support at the state level with things like grants and really kind of putting resources into ensuring the growth?

ERIC SAWATZKE: Yeah. This wouldn't happen without it, honestly. There doesn't have to be a huge investment, but it's a different kind of investment in education to think about buying cutting boards. And if you're going to do it inside of a classroom, you need to think about, do you have a hand washing station, a sink? Do you have a three bay sink to wash the facility, the equipment? And so there takes just a different kind of a cost and a purchase than a school is usually used to.

And so it's been great, and Department of Agriculture obviously knows agriculture and knows meat processing, so the legislature did the right thing and put it in the right department. And they've done a great job at working directly with us. In fact, the inspectors have been coming to ag teacher conferences for the last two and a half years and doing workshops with us on what kind of a facility we should set up, what kind of curriculum maybe we should put together, and they've been working hand in hand with us to make this happen.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And before we go, Eric, what would you say to students out there who maybe they don't have an FFA program where they go to school or agriculture isn't as big of a focus? How can they get involved so that they just stay educated on what's going on and how they get their food?

ERIC SAWATZKE: Sure. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a couple of good answers to that. One is look at family and consumer sciences. If you don't have an ag program, your family and consumer science teacher could do the same thing and bring it to that culinary level. Think about being a chef. They're going to take wholesale cuts and create a fancy steak cut. And they might have that interest there. The other option is to call up that local chef. Maybe there's a chance to do some shadowing and actually sit in that back shop and do some work, or go into the local butcher shop.

NINA MOINI: Oh, Eric, thank you so much for stopping by. I learned a lot and really appreciate your time.

ERIC SAWATZKE: Thank you so much.

NINA MOINI: That was Eric Sawatzke, high school agriculture teacher and FFA advisor at West Central Schools.