Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources 

and Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture 

South Deerfield, MA

Agricultural 

Marketing 

Service

March 2020

AMS GRANTS AWARDED

2012 Federal State Marketing Improvement Program 

(FSMIP) Grant for $32,060

Project types: General Market Analysis, Enterprise Planning, 

General Business Planning, Education & Outreach

HISTORY OF BUSINESS OR PROJECT

Based in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, Community 

Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, or CISA, was incorporated 

in 1999. Their mission is strengthening farms and engaging 

the community to build the local food economy. Their 

innovative program, Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown®, 

has helped start similar projects in many other parts of the 

country. They also provide extensive technical assistance; 

offer zero-interest emergency loans for farmers and farm 

businesses impacted by weather emergencies; partner 

on a community investment fund that provides financing 

to farm and food businesses; and support food access 

through a low-income senior Community Supported 

Agriculture and Massachusetts’ SNAP-rebate program.

CISA’s long-term work with farmers and ranchers and their 

desire to have more access to slaughter and value-added 

processing services led to their project, in which they 

researched meat producer and buyer needs and explored 

models for increasing local meat processing in western 

Massachusetts, specifically the Pioneer Valley. It was a 

collaborative research project between the Massachusetts 

Use a data driven approach to identify cost-effective solutions that have 

the most impact on the regional meat supply.

Department of Agricultural Resources and CISA, along 

with business students from the Isenberg School of 

Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

WHY THEY CHOSE TO APPLY FOR AN AMS 

GRANT/WHAT AN AMS GRANT MEANT FOR 

THEIR BUSINESS/ORGANIZATION?

The project would not have gotten off the ground were it 

not for the grant. It leveraged the organization’s capacity 

in very valuable ways. Several years later, CISA still relies 

on the information produced through the grant project in 

providing business assistance to meat producers, sourcing 

support to buyers, and delivering value-chain facilitation 

services. It also greatly advanced the organization’s 

understanding that a broader range of solutions needed 

to be understood and explored beyond adding more 

meat processors.

KEY IMPACTS OF THE GRANT, 

SHORT-TERM AND LONGER-TERM

The project team completed an in-depth research 

report and a fillable feasibility template for others to 

use (linked in the references on the next page). They 

found there were other potential ways to support local 

meat production that did not include building new meat 

processing infrastructure, such as aggregated transport 

and distribution. By working with graduate students, the 

project kept costs down yet still produced high quality 
research. The final products were useful not just for 

producers/processors in the project region, but also 

provided useful plans/templates for the rest of the 

country. The key recommendations generated in the final 

report were to:

• Establish a trade association for meat producers

and processors to better coalesce the business

interests of parties in the value chain and

advance an efficient and thriving market for local

meat products in the Pioneer Valley.

• Reduce transportation costs incurred by

producers and expand post-slaughter processing

options by delivering meat products from

local processors back to producers farms’

and facilitating access to regional secondary

processing facilities.

• Establish fee-for-service meat processing at

a local commercial kitchen for making small

batches of value-added products for producers

in the Pioneer Valley unable to meet volume

commitments required by existing processors.

According to Project Director Margaret Christie, “The 

research project empowered our team to establish 

stronger relationships with the existing meat processors 

and producers in their region.”

Interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders clarified 

the needs of meat processors and producers in this region 

and how to best address them. The team has responded 

to the findings, particularly around technical assistance, 

such as understanding carcass quality and a range of 

other related topics. CISA’s everyday technical assistance 

often focuses on business management, marketing, and 

troubleshooting, and research projects like this provide 

critical staff knowledge that improves the assistance 

CISA provides to farmers and the businesses that source 

from them.

Similarly, the project team included both processors and 

producers, which created opportunities for connections 

and mutual learning between the two groups. Following 

the project, CISA offered multiple workshops for meat 

producers on topics including meat cutting and improving 

communications with the processor.

WHERE THEY WOULD LIKE TO GO NEXT

Thus far, the project team has not pursued the specific 

recommendations in the report. More slaughter and 

butcher facilities have come online since the report was 

written, and other entrepreneurs are solving gaps by 

aggregating meat or offering meat buying clubs, among 

other efforts. The project team was not confident that a 

separate meat trade association was sustainable, yet CISA 

has taken on some of that technical assistance (one-onone, workshops and referrals) through their technical 

assistance programming. Staff are also more skilled at 

troubleshooting producer/processor relationships than 

they were before this project. 

This project helped a local shared-use kitchen gain 

approval for processing certain meat products. 

Additionally, two retail-exempt butchers opened in the 

region, one of which utilized CISA’s expertise gained 

through this project in their financing application.

Local institutions have pursued innovative approaches to 

sourcing more locally and regionally grown meat. These 

include a partnership through which several colleges will 

jointly purchase whole animals during the slow winter 

slaughterhouse season and the creation of products using 

underutilized local fish species.

REFERENCES/LINKS

https://www.buylocalfood.org/slaughter-and-meatprocessing/

https://www.buylocalfood.org/upload/resource/CISA_

MeatReport_2013.pdf

https://www.buylocalfood.org/feasibility-template-forsmall-scale-meat-processor-2013/

CONTACT INFORMATION

Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network

Rebecca Thistlethwaite

Email: thistler@oregonstate.edu

USDA Agricultural Marketing Service

Samantha Schaffstall

Email: samantha.schaffstall@usda.gov

This case study was 

created in fulfillment of 

a cooperative research 

agreement between 

the Marketing Services 

Division of the Agricultural Marketing Service of the 

United States Department of Agriculture (USDA AMS) and 

Oregon State University’s Niche Meat Processor Assistance 

Network (NMPAN).

Photo credit: USDA

USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, 

and lender.