Hi-Line Living: From Field to Fork

Jim Dumas, the owner of Big Sandy Meat Shop, has run his relatively modest meat processing facility in Big Sandy for a few years.

A crew of four or five, including himself, operates the processing facility and shop on a daily basis to provide local meat to customers and process animals for hunters and ranchers.

While they regularly process beef, pork, lamb and wild game, Wednesday, he and his crew were processing beef. Dumas said they can process two head of cattle a day.

"We're breaking the beef and cutting it up," Dumas said.

He said that the owner of the animal brings the carcass into his shop and tells them what they want done with it - what kind of cuts of meat they want or whether or not they want the cape if it's a game animal.

"We cut them up for them, package them and freeze them, and they can pick them up," Dumas said. "It's pretty much what we do all day."

In the back of the shop, Dumas has a cooler where they keep all the animals that are ready to be processed and a skinning floor, which had three deer hanging up to thaw that day.

"That's why we call them deer-cicles," Dumas joked. "Because we get them frozen when they come in, so they have to hang there for a while."

He said that the time they have to thaw can be a while, sometimes up to 10 days.

"Once they're frozen with their hide on, it takes a long time to get them thawed out," he said. If the customer wants the cape of the animal, it takes longer to thaw because trying to skin them while they are still a little frozen would ruin the hide.

Dumas, who is a board member of the Montana Meat Processors Association, said he got into the business of meat processing because he was born and raised on a ranch that his family owned since the early 1900s.

"It's diversification from the ranch because it isn't big enough to make a living for the family, so we needed to do something else," Dumas said. "So I bought this facility."

He said the only way to make money in the meat business is by sheer volume. Due to the extremely high overhead of starting and running such a business, they have to move through a lot of animals to make a profit.

"You have a lot of monthly expenses, with all your compressors running and everything for the utilities, and electricity to keep it really cold," he said. "The profit margin is pretty narrow."

He added that this is not an 8 to 5 job. He puts in 12 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

"Pretty much every shop will tell you that," he said.

Most of Dumas' business comes from beef production, he said, with pigs coming in second. They process a few sheep every year, but not many people are raising sheep compared to how they used to, he said.

The Big Sandy processor does a fair amount of wild game, but this year the numbers are down for wild game for many processors in the state.

Dumas said that buying locally faised meat is important in Montana, due to the lack of places one can do so.

In the front of his shop, he sells meat and other products, mostly of a local origin. He said that when he goes to a corral or field to "knock" an animal and he sees an animal he likes, he will buy it off the owner.

"If there is one standing there that I like the looks of, if it looks fed well, I'll buy it from them and have it slaughtered under inspection, cut it and retail it here," Dumas said.

When he knocks animals for customers, he will slaughter the animal, field dress them and take them back to his shop for processing before getting it back to the customer.

He said he was looking into opening a kill-floor in Big Sandy, but the city was not keen on the idea.

"I think it's a lack of understanding as to what it is and whatnot," he said. "They just don't want it here. It's a small community and 100 percent agricultural income economically, but they don't seem to care about that."

He said the taboo of such facilities hinders them from moving on expansion plans. He said the kill-floor would be good for the community, creating jobs and creating business in the area. The floor he would open would create five jobs, he said.

Most importantly, he said, he wants to provide a source of local-raised food for people in the area while making a profit.

"That's kind of what these little facilities like this are about," he said. "Is being able to get a deer and consume a deer without having to buy it. Instead of buying something from out east or even out of the country, you can go to Glacier and get something that hasn't been in a freezer for six months or shipped halfway across the country."

Dumas said the lack of local product in groceries is a pet peeve of his.

"This whole Hi-Line up here, we raise some of the best livestock in the nation," he said. "There's a lot of guys here that know what they're doing when they're feeding."

He pointed at the beef on the cutting table and remarked on how well-fed and healthy the animal was.

"But you go to a grocery store to buy a steak and it's from somewhere back east or out of the country," he said. "There's only a limited source where you can buy locally produced product."