Adams Farm Slaughter in Athol, Mass
As I have mentioned before we’ve been taking our pigs every week to Adams Farm Slaughter in Athol, Mass and been very pleased with them. They are by far the best in all of New England. I don’t say that lightly – we’ve worked with many different butchers over the decades, some good, some okay, some awful. Adams is at the tip top of the list as the most excellent. After taking thousands of pigs to them on our weekly schedule year round for six years I highly recommend them. If you need slaughter, butchering, sausage making, smoking and want to know your animals are well handled then see the Adams family.
Adams Farm Slaughter is a family owned and operated full service USDA inspected meat processing facility located in Athol, Massachusetts. They do humane slaughter following Temple Grandin‘s guide lines. Adams offers scald & scrape for pigs from wee oven roaster sizes up to 500 pounders as well as doing sheep, cattle, goats and bison.
They also are setup for hanging and aging – something many processors do not have the space for. They have that all important separate hot box and cold box to get it right. All this is under the eye of brother Rick Adams.
His sister Noreen runs the butchering, sausage and smoking. They offer full linking – something many butcher’s don’t do – and smoking on-site.
There is another brother Robert as well as many cousins and the family matriarch Beverly who originally started the farm and slaughterhouse with her husband 50 years ago. A true family business.
Adams is so good that if they were next door to us I probably never would have build our own on-farm USDA/State inspected meat processing facility. We drive six hours every week to get our pigs to them for slaughter. That’s very high praise indeed for their job well done!
This past month we finished all the construction on the butchering phase of our own butcher shop. Last week I met for five and a half hours with the head of inspection to go over our HACCP sanitation plan, SSOPs, GMPs and other paperwork. It was great to get all my questions answered. Since then I’ve been working on incorporating that and Friday will meet with him again to go over the changes. My goal is to submit the final paperwork next week. Hopefully we’ll then get our license to cut soon after that.
While we wait for approval we’ll do another dry run, our first wet run – a not for sale half pig. As soon as we have our license we’ll do our official first pig butchered at the Sugar Mountain Farm Butcher Shop.
We’re building our butcher shop out in phases. This has always been the plan since it is a very big project. As the project developed I’ve made some adjustments to phases such as we are splitting the walk-in coolers off the initial build phase. We’ll be finishing those next come winter. Now that we have the shell and the initial portion the butcher shop can start paying for the next portion of construction. Each of the future phases are small in comparison to what we’ve already gotten done. The hardest work is over and now we’ll get to start enjoying the fruits of our labor.
There will be more big projects in the future but I suspect none of them will be as intense, big or long as the Butcher Shop at Sugar Mountain Farm. The level of complexity, regulations, wiring, plumbing, engineering are probably a peak. We may do some structures that are taller like the coming tower or some that have larger foot prints like another Ark but those will be simpler than the Butcher Shop and much faster to finish. The Butcher Shop has been a huge family achievement, something we are all proud of and look forward to using for centuries to come.
We will only do processing for livestock for our own farm – that will keep us plenty busy. If you’re looking for high quality, professional, humane slaughter, butchering, sausage making or smoking I highly recommend Adams Farm Slaughter in Athol, Mass.
Outdoors: 85°F/60°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 72°F/62°F
Daily Spark: I decided I want to live to be 1,000 so I’m celebrating my birthday more often.
Note that this is not a paid endorsement, advertisement or anything like that. The Adams family don’t even know I posted this unless one of them stumbles on this review of their excellent services. Our family is simply a very happy customer. If you’re looking for a butcher, first look for farmers who speak enthusiastically about that butcher.
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
Is your butcher shop based on Adams facility but on smaller scale ?
There are certainly many things I learned from observing the Adams facility – they have been very helpful to us. But our facility is scaled for just our farm and species needs as well as being built out of very different materials and along different principles of construction. So in short, the answer is yes and no. :)
As a point of scale reference, they process in a day more than we’ll probably ever process in a month. They serve many farmers from all over greater New England and they also do many different species.
Live 10 minutes from Adams Farm although they have never butchered anything other than my deer for me they do a great job at that. They also have a great store right on site for the public to by local meats, etc. I have also used Blood Farms in Groton, MA when I did have farm animals to process. Both facilities were great. Good luck with yours!