COURTENAY – After nearly five years in the making, Christine Mooney is excited to be finally putting the finishing touches on her federally inspected poultry abattoir, thanks to her perseverance and Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC’s Small Food Processor Scale-Up grant.
In fall 2023, Mooney was making the best of her small space and Farmgate Plus licence to help poultry producers with their processing needs in the Comox Valley. The grant’s $150,000 boost will support facility expansion and an upgrade to a federally inspected abattoir, significantly increasing capacity.
“Getting this grant made all the difference. There’s no way I would have been able to afford to do all of this on top of what I’ve already spent out of pocket getting to this point,” Mooney says. “It’s exciting. I’m hoping to allow all the people that stopped raising poultry to start again and be excited for it and have something that is easily accessible for everyone.”
Along with six staff members, Mooney will operate a semi-automated processing line two days a week to start, with the goal of processing 500 birds a day. The funding wasn’t quite enough to facilitate cut-and-wrap offerings as well, but Duane Zimmerman of Single Tree Meat Processing, a fully licensed and government-inspected provider in the valley, provides these services.
When the new and improved abattoir is up and running in May, Mooney hopes to hire a floor manager so that she can continue working as a nurse and balance her two near-full-time jobs.
While momentum is building in the right direction, Mooney worked long and hard to get to this point and faced many hurdles along the way in pursuit of helping local poultry producers stay viable.
Mooney submitted her first abattoir proposal to the Comox Valley Regional District in late 2019 and the following three years were filled with contradictory information and neighbour pushback.
“It was hard. It was a lot of roadblocks, a lot of two steps forward, five steps backwards, two more steps forward, one step backwards,” she says. “No one was really straight-forward with their answers.”
Having spent 15 years developing her dream farm in the Comox Valley, Mooney needed to find a new location that met the regional district’s and Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s regulations if she wanted to keep her aspirations of running an abattoir alive.
“We looked at probably about 80 different farms between Campbell River and Nanaimo,” Mooney says. “We needed certain setbacks from waterways and lot lines. I wanted it to be on city water as well water requires testing that is expensive. I also needed three-phase electrical, plus a house that would fit our family on the same property.”
Also, the property needed to be in the Agricultural Land Reserve and the Agricultural Land Commission needed to grant permission for building permits, zoning and bringing in fill for the abattoir.
“The regional districts have exclusions on every type of property and an abattoir is not allowed on any property except ALR,” Mooney says.
Fortunately, after an arduous process, Mooney found a suitable property and received approvals 200 days after initiating the process. However, banks and insurance companies didn’t want anything to do with the venture.
“Financing for an abattoir was almost impossible,” Mooney says. Despite working with a bank for over five months to secure funding for the construction of a new abattoir, nothing was approved.
So, Mooney pivoted to the Farmgate Plus licence, financed everything out of pocket and the regional district eventually allowed her to use a building on the property that they had previously claimed was inadequate. She found a European insurance company to cover her business.
Process too difficult
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” says Small-Scale Meat Producers Association executive director Julia Smith. “It’s great that they’re making [scale-up] funding available, but that whole process needs to be easier. … The people who need it the most do not have time to navigate the quagmire of funding paperwork. You shouldn’t have to be a superhero to get it done.”
Smith would like to see specialized support available through industry associations, including SSMPA, the BC Cattlemen’s Association and BC Sheep Federation to guide people through the funding application process. Part of the BC Ministry of Agriculture and Food’s budget could enable producer groups to have that support role on staff, she adds.
“Rather than the producer having to reinvent the wheel and learn how to write grants and keep track of all of the reporting requirements, wouldn’t it be great if there were people available to support them?” Smith asks.
Mooney first opened the doors of her abattoir in November 2023 but quickly met her 25,000 lb quota with the Farmgate Plus licence because of the high demand in the area.
“I turned so many farms away last year. I just couldn’t accommodate them with my quota,” Mooney says.
Lost income
Following the closure of The Cluck Stops Here in Whiskey Creek in 2020 and increased pressure on Paradise Meadows Poultry in Black Creek, many local producers decided to stop raising birds altogether.
“We lost just over three years of income from selling poultry and we lost a lot of our customers,” says Courtenay’s Maplesprings Farm owner Karen Eigler. Not being able to raise poultry resulted in the loss of over $15,000 during that time. “It hurt us financially. I had just retired, and we planned on farm income,” she adds.
Eigler and her husband John used to raise upwards of 625 turkeys and roaster chickens a year. The lack of available processing meant the couple didn’t raise any birds in 2021 and 2022. They raised a few birds for themselves in 2023. The prospect of Mooney’s new facility has been a game-changer.
“It’s such an open-arm welcome. It’s filling the void,” John Eigler says.
Prior to 2021, they made a three-hour round-trip on back-to-back days during the processing period to get their poultry done. Mooney’s facility is a convenient 10-minute drive away.
“Farming is in our blood. My husband was born and raised on this farm, and when we got going on it and people really liked our food, we felt really good about it and we were selling out all the time,” Karen Eigler says. “We can’t say how much we are thrilled that Christine is up and running in the valley. We wish her a very prosperous and successful business.”
The abattoir has been closed since mid-December for renovations, but Mooney has already booked in several thousand chickens for the spring. She also looks forward to boosting her own poultry numbers to about 600 chickens and 150 turkeys this year now that she has secure processing available on site.
“It’s some forward momentum at a time when we really need it,” Smith says of Mooney’s ability to wade through the bureaucracy and get her abattoir in place. “There are consumers that want to buy these products, but we’ve all been getting so discouraged lately. To see Christine stick with this and achieve this … in spite of the adversity that she’s had to overcome. She’s been able to move the industry forward a little bit.”
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