Mohican Farms LLC in Blairstown is getting ready to open a farm-to-table restaurant and market in November, offering a healthy alternative to processed food produced who-knows-where.
Today, owners Ryan Herold and Sean Lavery sell what they produce at a farm store on-site, and when it comes to meat, that means a lot of planning and driving to a processor in Pennsylvania.
“Ours are usually about two hours away,” Herold said Friday of places to process their chickens, lamb, pigs and cattle. “There’s not many in New Jersey, and the few there are, it’s impossible to get in. It’s a real problem, since COVID especially.
“You almost have to book like a good year in advance, so I have to really book all my slaughter dates for the next year, which makes it very difficult.”
Warren County’s board of commissioners last week backed a solution, with passage of a resolution in support of someone somewhere within the county opening a meat processing facility.
“I think in Warren County, there are USDA facilities that can do the individual one or two steers or deer, things like that,” said Commissioner Director James Kern III. “What we’re talking about is a much larger scale, because there’s such a backup.”
The board’s resolution also approved by Commissioners Jason Sarnoski and Lori Ciesla does not endorse a specific site, and Kern said he hasn’t heard of any interest in the idea yet.
“What we really want to do is kind of by passing this resolution show that we support the farming community in Warren County,” Kern said. “And should something like this materialize, we want to be a partner in however we can facilitate that wherever the location would be that would want to welcome that in the community.”
In supporting the concept of developing a processing plant in the…
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