With the recent presidential executive orders aimed at helping boost the nation’s livestock and meat industries, Undersecretary for Food Safety, Mindy Brashears, shares more details.
“Some of the barriers that we face are really related to inspection and having access to inspected slaughter facilities. In some areas of the country, we’ve been told that it can take up to a year to get their animals in a small plant in some of the more remote areas, or they have to drive five hours to take their animal in to get harvested,” described Brashears.
“There’s a lot of outdated regulations that we are looking to modify to really move toward new technology, and this could be anything from record keeping all the way down to how people wash their hands and what we expect of that. And then also really giving access through not only our custom exempt programs, perhaps moving to a state program inspection, or even state programs moving to CIS so the product can cross state lines and have further access to more customers. So we have several components in place to be able to facilitate those different actions,” Brashears added.
Audio Reporting by Elizabeth Sanders for Southeast AgNet.