Times are tough for small livestock and poultry producers. The consolidation of the meat industry has resulted in the closing of hundreds of slaughter and packing plants, and some of the ones still in operation often don't cater to small, specialty orniche producers. Many of these packers require high minimum head counts for slaughter, and they're often too far away to make trucking of relatively small shipments of animals to them economically feasible. In addition, high feed and other costs aren'tmatched by the prices producers get for their live animals.
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