Selling Farm Fresh Meat in Michigan
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EmailFebruary 27, 2025
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Every farm needs a stream of revenue to support itself and selling meat products derived from the animals you raise can help your livestock pay for themselves. This session provides an introduction to selling fresh meat in Michigan help farmers understand the major decision points and regulatory concerns involved in deciding to get hogs, sheep, goats and cattle processed and sold as meat in Michigan.
The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/
Video Transcript
Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us at another edition of the MI Ag Ideas to Grow with Conference. My name is Jon Laporte. I'll be helping to moderate today. Also wanted to share and give a big thank you to our sponsor for one of our sponsors here, AgriStrategies, LLC. And Steve there has been very supportive. Actually, he's popped in on some of the sessions here this week. Great help to a lot of producers out there. We appreciate his support in the programming, and he's been a sponsor actually the last several years. So he has some information there if you want to check out more about AgriStrategies, LLC, and if anybody wants this slide up again later or access to the information, I can also share it again later as well. The other thing I want to make sure we share with everybody is that we have some resources related to farm stress. Some programming that is being offered through MSU Extension. We want to make sure that you folks knew that was available. We know that time, especially with the economy can be a little bit challenging and that can create situation of stress and multiple other things that come with the challenges of operating a farm. We wanted to make sure that everyone's aware we do have resources to help. People are finding themselves in stressful situations and MSU Extension is definitely willing to help you work through some of those and put you in contact with other people that can help as well. With that, I'm actually going to turn things over to Sam. All right. Well, thanks to Jon and the team for asking me to talk and thank you all of you for showing up. This is a really great crowd. I feel like webinars are always very hit or miss. So I appreciate all of you being here. I see several friends on the call, so feel free to heckle me if you'd like. Many of you will recognize the ponies behind me. Those are from Tollgate Farm. First, I just wanted to introduce myself and say that one of my biggest pet peeves and I'm sure yours is just having a bunch of academics or lawyers or white pages ranting at you about how to farm and do your job and all these things. I'm coming to this and I decided that I wanted to create these publications because I'm a farmer myself. I have had to figure these things out on my own. I consider myself a relatively intelligent person and yet for whatever reason, it was incredibly hard to wade through all of the web pages and documents and legal ease to actually find answers for how to get your animals slaughtered in a way that you can actually make a profit legally from selling them for meat. I'm a dairy goat specialist. I'm a judge. I travel all over the country helping folks learn how to raise goats and optimize their small ruminant performance. There's a picture of me doing showmanship as a kiddo and some of my 4-H kids now. Yeah, I love this work. I love working with farmers, and that's where I'm coming from. A few other just introductory points. I work at MSU's Center for Regional Food Systems. We're actually an academic unit within the College of Ag that sits adjacent and complementary to Extension. We do a lot of work in food systems equity, making sure that all people have access to healthy, green, fair, affordable foods, and a huge part of that is interfacing with farmers and making sure that they have the resources that they need to feed their community and also make a living. That's the SOF. We have a ton of program areas. It's very hard to distinguish where Extension is, where CRFS is. But these are just a handful of them. I want to highlight before we get into the meat processing discussion, I want to highlight a few areas that actually might be of use to you because everybody needs some extra support, especially when it is cash money. So I want to make sure that you all are aware that MSU recently got a grant to run the Great Lakes Midwest Regional Food Business Center. That means that very shortly here we are going to have funds to help farmers access technical assistance, something like a tax preparer or a web designer or um, you know, a lawyer. All of those sort of business development pieces, the Regional Food Business Center is going to have funds to help hire consultants to work with farmers and food producers. So stay tuned for that. I've got my colleague, Madelina's email on there. You can get ahold of her if you have any questions. And then the Business Builder awards are actually larger grants up to $100,000 over the life of the program that farmers can apply for to use for a number of different farm expenses. And so those grants will be launching. Hopefully, very soon, the plan just got submitted. So um, we want to have those funds available to people as soon as possible. So keep an eye out. If you're getting CRFS communications, if you're on any of our Listservs or socials, you will see information about this. But we want to make sure that you guys know to apply for the money. And then a little bit more about my work at CRFS that is not livestock related necessarily is I work with a lot of food hubs. Some of you might have seen that recently MDARD launched a grant to provide some funds for farm stops and food hubs, and really all those are is local aggregation and distribution markets. Any kind of if you have a farm, and you decided you wanted to sell your products at a roadside stand, but then all of a sudden your neighbor did too and their neighbor did. If you're aggregating and distributing products locally or regionally, helping people get access to the food that is being grown in their own communities, you're a food hub. We have a food Hub network that I coordinate here in Michigan, and then we also have a national Food Hub survey. This is my plea, please take the survey. If you're doing local aggregation, this research helps us advocate for funds from the state, the federal government, foundations to help more food hubs get started to provide infrastructure. There's the link at the bottom, there's the QR code. I can throw this back up later. But if you are doing local food aggregation, distribution at any scale, please take the survey. We want to hear from you. It shouldn't take that long as long as you have your financial information because one of the big arguments we want to make with this survey is that food hubs are an economic driver, but that they also still need more support to have a greater impact. With that, I'll stop giving you the intro spiel and we'll get to the good stuff. Um, so we're going to talk about this flowchart, this publication, which actually came originally from a white paper in a journal published by my boss. I found it and I said, I love this flowchart. I wish more people had it and I wish they knew what it meant because I would have loved to have this when I was trying to get animals slaughtered during COVID and couldn't find any place to slaughter them and didn't know how to sell them and I just knew I didn't need the animals and I did need the cash. So, um, we reorganized this flowchart and then created a document that walks you through it. Today, I broke it up into these slides and we're going to walk through it slowly. This is the point where Jon, I can't see anything or anybody. I can't see chats, I can't see hands. This is where you are free to stop me at any time and say, Sam, you're full of it because I'm not the meat extension person. This is all research that I've done with consultants and experience myself. So if you have questions or need clarification or like, I saw this, what does it mean? Please raise your hand, flag down, Jon, I'm happy to stop and go back. Just to make sure we're thinking about the right things, this publication and what we're talking about today is only red meat animals, no birds and no rabbits. Beef, lamb, pork, and goats. I think the first thing that we want to know before they go, the first thing that we want to make sure that we're considering are who we want to be selling to our market. Can we get the animals to the slaughterhouse safely? Then do we have freezer space? That's probably the biggest thing we need to have freezer space as the farmer, as the aggregator, whoever, and then we need to make sure that our clients have freezer space because it is very easy to underestimate how large half a steer is. There are resources on the Extension website for how much freezer space how big of a freezer do I have to buy for the steer? Those are the things that we need to be thinking about before we are even booking the, the slaughter date. The other thing that I would recommend is making sure that you get ahold of your butcher or your slaughter before you haul the animals in because some like to have different fasting protocols for the animals before they come into slaughter. If you've done poultry, you know that people are less worried about it usually with cattle and big livestock, but it's good to talk to them just in case. So we're going to be working through the market. The market, who is our end user is going to be a big piece of this throughout our conversation. Just take a note of that. We can do live sale of animals for, um, and then for personal use, and then we can have direct to consumer, retail and wholesale. So keep those in mind as we go forward here. What we're going to do is work through different columns of this flowchart. This is probably the column that you all are most familiar with. This was my entry into buying local meat, and that's the sale on the hoof for custom exempt. This is a lot of people are familiar with this value chain stream because if you go to a 4-H auction, or a county fair auction and you are buying a steer from a four a kid, this is how you're going to do it. This is why it's legal. So the animal is actually sold to the end user while it's alive. That's why we call it sail on the hoof and it's sold based on its live weight, not its finished weight. The reason that then you can utilize this custom exempt slaughter and processing chain is because technically, the owner of the animal is the one paying for it to be slaughtered. Any questions there? Did that make sense? We're going to go into it a little bit deeper next. You can also unmute yourself and yell at me as well. I'm going to go on. This is the kind of slaughter chain that you could use for anything from meat CSA or just even meat shares. I want a quarter of a beef, I want a half of a beef, I want a half of a pig. Or if you wanted to buy the entire animal, I'm Greek, so we want to eat a whole lamb on a spit for Easter. This is a way to do that too. I can buy the whole lamb. Um, I will also say that sale on the hoof means on the hoof. I did not put this in the publication, but the farmer and the owner of the animal can always slaughter their own animal if you have those skills. So just keep that in mind. But we're going to move on here in this custom exempt column. So the way that custom exempt works is that these slaughterhouse, and the processing facilities are managed by the state, regulated by the state as opposed to the USDA. I have links. So if you want to go get into the nitty gritty, read the laws, They are there, you can go look at them. So those licenses and regulations are what is laying out what can be considered custom exempt. You go to that slaughter facility. Sometimes that slaughter facility will also have the primary processing in the same building. Sometimes these buildings will be combined, but they can be separated out. That custom exempt slaughter facility can then sell the carcass direct to the owner, not necessarily the farmer, we've sold that animal. They can sell the carcass directly back, they can sell individual cuts back, or they can do value added processing, so they can do the smoking, the bacon, that sort of the sausage, that sort of thing. Is everybody with me? Okay. So what is most important about custom exempt slaughter is that you cannot sell the meat. So if you have gotten animals slaughtered in this way, it is illegal to sell an individual cut of meat. It is illegal to sell anything that's already dead because it has not been processed appropriately. So if you want to sell what we call a finished meat product, if you want to sell the animal after it's dead, if you want to sell the cuts of meat individually, you're going to have to go With a USDA inspected slaughter and processing chain. If you are selling any cuts of meat, if you're selling in any building, think of it that way too. If you're selling in a building, you need to be USDA processed. So the first stream we're going to talk about right now is wholesale. Wholesale, if you're wanting to. Sam. Yes. Before we get too far into that, we did have a question in the chat. Yes. Before you leave that personal use section. Question is, is it legal to give it away to friends and family? Yes. Excellent question and I didn't do that. Yes. The way that that's a great question. People are so smart. The way that the law defines it is that it is for personal use and personal use can include your family, employees, folks that you would be providing it to without cost. Absolutely, you may do that. Great question. Again, personal use, it could be the farmer or it could be you having sold the live animal and then it's whoever you sold that animal to. So now that we're back in USDA inspected, they do continuous inspection in these plants, right? This is when they're going through, and you can see I've got these little circle stamps all over this page, and that's because when you go into a USDA plant, they've got that big old stamp and they put it on each of the carcasses. Like, yes, this is safe, it's not disgusting. It's been slaughtered and processed in a clean environment, all of those things. So these facilities have gone through continuous federal inspection. They have the federal permits, et cetera. And so one of the venues that you can sell this kind of slaughtered and processed food is wholesale. If you want to sell to a restaurant, farm to table restaurant, I highly recommend that. You will get excellent prices. The chefs are amazing to work with. They use a much wider variety of cuts and are willing to pay for the weird cuts that you're not going to be able to sell to people. They buy tongue, they buy brain, they buy all the kinds of stuff. If you don't have a relationship with a chef, get one. They're awesome. You can sell wholesale at restaurants, you can sell wholesale to hotels, you can sell to an aggregator or a distributor. Then the other thing you can always do is just direct to consumer. If you're at a farmers market and you are selling lamb chops or five pounds of ground beef, this is how you have to do it. You need to be selling USDA processed and labeled cuts of meat unless it's part of a share and they technically bought the live animal. Making sense here. We're going to go on. The next market that we could be selling to still in this USDA inspected value chain is the retail market. The biggest difference here, you're still getting slaughtered at a USDA facility, you're still getting primary processing at a USDA facility. The only difference here is that you can take those primal cuts and they could go to a retail exempt processing facility. Really, all that is is it's a different set of legislation that Michigan has to make it more accessible for small butchers to do processing of things like sausages, smoked meats, value added meat products, and there are a few different stipulations for how those can be sold. Again, I've got the links there for you, but basically, that's the only difference. Some of these you will find that some specialty butcher shops, often if they're standalone, they might just have the retail exempt label. I will say that usually if you are going down this USDA inspected route, it's going to be easiest and you're going to find places usually that are just all USDA inspected all the way down. You go to Slaughter and processing, it's USDA inspected, and they're also going to offer you to do the bacon the ham, et cetera Keep it simple, but just know that this is an option. You can read more about it. There's a variance for this extra meat processing. I went through that fast because I feel like the biggest piece of this is there needs to be questions and the biggest problem here is that we never have a good space for questions. I This is ask me anything. I'm going to stop sharing my screen so that I can see your faces and your questions in the chat. Yes, now I can see the chat. It's so much better. Yes, you can get a copy of this presentation. What I'm going to do is I'm going to post the recording on the same page that the publication is on. I'm going to show you that right now. If you go, I'm going to share my screen again. This is what the landing pages look like. If you Google this, it should come up, value added products from the farm selling fresh meat in Michigan. It's part of this series that my colleague Jamie has done. We have information on legally selling shell eggs and honey. This has been added there. And so what we've done here is we've linked the meat fact sheet here. It's got all of the links you could ever possibly want to the regulations and the laws and just further even grants that you can apply for if you want to do meat processing. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this recording up on YouTube. We will link it to this page so that you have access to it. Yes, Michelle, there are regulations for advertising. It's not advertising so much as it's online sales. There are some categories that you cannot sell online, but most of them you can. If you're advertising, again, like if you're advertising custom exempt, you're selling an animal. You can sell it online. I believe and like I said, I still have to double check these things because I don't do this every day, but I believe I have that in the publication. I'm going to show you the publication itself now. But this is what it looks like and will walk you through It's got the flow chart on the first page, and then it has laid out way more information than I had on the PowerPoint and all the different options you have. It also has scenarios. If you look under slaughter and you have sale options, personal use only, it lays out there must be consumed by the owner of the animal or non paying guests and employees. Okay. Another good question, and there is and there should be online sales. It is in here. I would control eff. But yes, there are certain regulations, but they're pretty small. There are also regulations for which value streams can be sold across state lines. If you are doing sale of meat products across state lines, you're going to have to be USDA inspected all the way down. Um So another question was compliance for storage of meat. How do we build a storage space that is up to the requirements of the USDA? That's a better question there are regulations on that. So depending on how you are wanting to store things, what you might end up having to do is get a retail license and have your freezers and things inspected to be in compliance with that license. That would be I would reach out to if you do not have a product center membership already, Jamie, Jamie or Wendy, can you put that link in the chat to sign up for the Product Center. The Product Center is a branch of AgBio and they do a lot of the package. Once things are slaughtered and packaged and ready to go, they do a lot of the education around that and they're very on the up and up around having, you know, um, hazard pass up of hazard management plans, storage certifications, that sort of thing. But yes, depending on how you are planning to sell, you will need to if you're doing retail, you're going to need to have that retail license. If you are just doing custom exempt, again, that's different. The person who is taking on buying the animal live. If you're then just storing the meat for them until they can pick it up or something like that, no big deal. It's much different because then they were technically the owner of the animal itself. Any other questions? I'll also throw it out there that a lot of folks that I know in the sheep and goat world are selling live animals, like live. Live animals to then go and be slaughtered some people have that skill, some people want to do that on themselves. Oftentimes, if you are slaughtering an animal for, um, in alignment with religious practices that you might want to take it to someplace special or slaughter yourself. That is completely legal. Again, that is selling the animal live on the hoof. You're not slaughtering it. They're going to be consuming it after they did that work. So while you need to be obviously extremely careful in terms of food safety, that is absolutely legal and that's one way to get the animals off of your farm and into the food chain. Other questions. Again, I would say that if you are new to meat processing, particularly post COVID, when you buy the animal and the animal is born, that's when you book the slaughter date. We are always going to need and want more slaughterhouses, so be sure to book your appointments ahead of time so that you don't get stuck with animals. Is there any aspect of feed that affects your ability to sell animal as halal or kosher? Amazing question. The ethnic market, however you want to call it, is a friend of farmers everywhere. As far as I know, again, not an expert, but as far as I know diet, no. Depending on how strict the observer is because as with all things, this is on a sliding scale. Depending on how strict the observer is, there are certain ways that the animal should or shouldn't be altered, for instance, if you are eating a halal animal, that animal has to have been slaughtered at a halaal facility, with an imam present to bless and then there's certain aspects of the slaughter process itself that need to be regulated. Um, From what I understand, if you're taking a very strict observance of that, you don't want the animal really to be altered in any way, tail docking or disbudding of the goats would be less than ideal. However, I've not heard of too many people who have run into an issue with selling those animals through a halal butcher. Um, so again, if you know for sure, who you're selling to, I would just encourage you to ask them what they're looking for. And then also your Halal or Kosher butcher might be a good resource as well. Just, you know, talk to them about the kind of animals that they see come through their spaces and what people are looking for. And for context, like, a lot of the halal butcher shops will go and buy animals at, like, United Producers. Those animals are a mixed bag, right? Like, those have been raised in all sorts of different ways, and they still get to go through the halal slaughterhouse. So it's very up to the individual's discretion. Any other questions? So just to wrap up, if you're selling meat at a farmers market, please make sure that it is USDA inspected, unless you just have people picking up CSA shares. If you are selling individual cuts, it needs to have gone through a USDA inspected facility. That's just a good rule of thumb, if you're selling individual cuts, USDA, if you're selling quarters, halves, you can do custom exempt slaughter. Hey, Sam? Yes. This is great. I know I think I missed what you actually said. In wholesale related to I think you said there was an exception if you were selling the animal on share or before it died or whatever it was, could you kind of restate that? Yeah. So you cannot sell wholesale unless the animal has been through a USDA slaughter and processing chain. The only if if you are selling to The only time you can sell in shares and have it not be USDA inspected is if they bought that share while the animal was still alive based on the overall weight or the live value of that animal, right? Because we want to make sure that they have taken ownership of that animal so that then they can be the one who is putting them through that value added state regulated slaughter and processing chain. So they need to own the animal, have it USDA slaughtered as their animal? No. So once it's their animal, they can have it custom exempt slaughtered. There I just had another. I came in late. If you are selling from your farms on your property, are you USDA exempt? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. No, no, no. If you are selling from a farmstand on your property changes nothing. You need to be selling within the same regulations, it doesn't matter what property you're on. So if you are selling a share of the animal, so if you sold the animal to somebody while it was alive, it doesn't have to physically go to their property. But if you sold half a steer or a half a pig, Then you can get it custom exempt slaughtered. Essentially, the new owner will pay the butcher, they'll pay you, and then they'll pay the slaughter and butcher their processing fees, and then they will either pick up the meat themselves or you can decide to pick it up and deliver it to them for an added fee. If you are selling at your farms on your property, if you are selling just cuts of meat, if people are showing up to your farm market and buying cuts of meat, they need to be USDA inspected. They need to be from a USDA slaughter and processing facility. And again, this was beef beef, pork, and Beef, pork, goat, and lamb. Michelle, best practices for documentation, that's a great question. There aren't in the legales themselves, there's not a whole lot. So what I would suggest is more is better and make sure that you're keeping receipts and make sure that you are documenting that that person is buying one way that you could do that is I am buying a 1,200 pound steer, live weight, and you're paying $3 a pound times 1,200, to line item in and out on your receipt, something like that. Make sure that it's indicated that they're paying for the animal before it's been slaughtered. That is in the terms, the animal cannot be slaughtered before the person buys it, because that defeats the purpose of the exemption. Rabbit meat, whole different thing, they're considered more like in the poultry vein, Also, so you can get trained to butcher on your property. Poultry completely different, that is forthcoming. That publication is on its way. It's literally in the works right now. That will be launched very soon. It's going to look very similar to this one. Have a flowchart. There is an existing document that I can send to Jon out that has a bit of a flowchart, but essentially poultry have different exemptions. If you are slaughtering a a low number of birds, you can do that as the producer on your own property. Different set of regulations, though, and I don't have them all pulled up right now. But as soon as that, we will advertise it when that publication is ready to launch. Let me find the link for you, though, right now to the existing I I will put it in the chat. Here it is. This is your best guide for right now. I referenced this guide heavily in the publication that I'm working on now. But it will walk you through the number of birds that you can slaughter as a processor and how you can sell them legally. But again, it's different. Rabbits, I think they're considered poultry. They're a black box for me. I won't lie to you. I would recommend getting ahold of somebody that you know who raises rabbits and asking them, and then double checking that with probably going to a butcher who you know does rabbits and asking them about what licenses and such that they have. The other thing that you can do is it is linked on the website. With the publication is there are a variety of links to the USDA website and the Food Safety and Inspection Service. You can go and poke around on that website. I will warn you right now, some pages have been pulled down. So no promises that all of these links work anymore. We will try to get them updated. But trying to do that, talk to your rabbit producers that you know and then go to the actual butcher themselves. I know that there is a custom exempt facility, excuse me, there's a USDA inspected facility that does poultry processing. They will also do rabbits. Um, so if you can find a place like that, that's a good way to go. If when in doubt, just get them into a USDA slaughter facility. I will say, I have not found that much of a discrepancy in the cost of custom exempt versus USDA slaughter. It's just a matter of, can you get a spot? Which is why I always say the animal is born, the animals bought, book book of time for to die because you do not want to get stuck with the animal longer than you want it. Yes. So if the rules are the same as poultry, that may be an option for rabbits. But I do not know. And so I would be very, very careful with doing that. Get some actually, and I'll put another link in the chat for you. I would reach out to The folks at the Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network, they are actually out of the West Coast and so they might be able to help you with the rabbits. Joe, great question. If I own the pig, if you own the animal and you want to eat the animal, go hog wild, literally. Please don't kill yourself accidentally by using unsafe things. But if you're going to own it and you're going to eat it, that's completely legal, up to you. That's also why selling an animal on the hoof allows you to use exempt processing because technically, they are then doing the same thing. Whoever owns that live animal, it's up to them how they want to slaughter it, how they want to get it processed. It's when you're selling the meat product that the USDA is concerned about regulating that. Any additional webinars specifically for retail selling meat? Not that I'm aware of. I try to share them when I find them. I have been waiting for a long time for MSU Extension has been trying to fill the meat educator position and I maybe Jon knows, but I don't know if anybody has been hired yet. Cross your fingers like we need that person really, really badly because hopefully they would be doing more of this education because we all know how much it's needed. Um We can send out we will share widely as much information about this as we can when we have it. I don't know of any webinar scheduled yet, but hopefully more in the future. Is there a path to selling wild boars? Wildlife, completely different. Again, there is a tremendous amount of regulation around selling hunted or trapped or wild animals. Those are regulated in conjunction with fish and wildlife. Many of you might see that the deer are getting dropped off after hunting, but they're not getting sold. That is a completely different ballgame. Please do not go trying to sell wild game without regulation because that can be a very serious federal offense. Make sure that you do separate research into that because selling wildlife, whether it was captive or hunted or anything, that's all a completely different set of regulations. They do not fall under the pig category. Oh, yeah. Definitely want people to shoot them and eat them, for sure. South Carolina and again, all states are going to have separate regulations. This publication and what I'm talking about is specifically from Michigan. All of the states have different regulations. So what I talked about here, the USDA portions are transferable to other states. Anything that's federally regulated, so the USDA is the same across the country. But if it is custom exempt, that changes by state. Some states might not have it, some states might and it's different. Even if you're moving, if you've moved from I think somebody said they moved from Washington, the laws could change because once it's not USDA inspected, it's on the states to regulate it and that changes. They're also a problem in Michigan, by the way. They are here as well. Honestly, if you're running into a problem that you think you just need somebody to answer it and you just can't find that person, feel free to reach out to me. Google, Sam Stokes, MSU, all come up, my email is right on there. Other thing I highly recommend for folks is join the product center. Wendy's on this call. They're really good at helping you navigate what licenses you need, whether you're a consumer package goods maker or a farmer looking to sell products. They're really good at that. It's like a one time payment of 100 bucks, but then you have access to a counselor and all of their resources. Anytime you need it, you can just shoot them an email. Those are two things I highly recommend. That Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network, they're very helpful too, and hopefully we will have a new meat educator. At extension soon. Then also don't underestimate the power of your successful neighbors who are farming. We all know that you have to take everything people say with a grain of salt and that you can't believe anything you see on Facebook, but don't let that dissuade you from still utilizing that network. People are doing this and they've been doing it for a long time, and just make sure that you go in with your eyes open and understand that legislation changes. You want to protect yourself and your farm as much as possible. Someone came into my office, but can you talk about cottage food law? Cottage food law, that is pertaining to baked usually baked goods and those are Those are that is a relatively easy law to understand in so much as that there is a document it lists the kind of foods you're allowed to make under Cottage Food Law, and if it's not on that list, it has to be created in a commercial licensed kitchen. Let me pull up that link. That's another one where the product center, that is their bread and butter, helping people navigate cottage food law because there are certain things you have to do to be in compliance. You just can't have an unlabeled loaf of bread that you're selling and be in compliance. You can cook that loaf of bread in your own kitchen and it doesn't have to be an inspected kitchen, but there are certain labels that need to be on it so that you're in compliance with cottage food law. Wool or hides, great question. I am not aware of any regulation around selling wool or hides. I will say, good luck finding somebody who will process them. Will obviously, make sure you have a good shear, you're going to have to take it to a mill to get cleaned and processed. Um, That is an extremely expensive process and usually, you're not going to make your money back unless you have really beautiful moreno fine beautiful wool or the best market in the world. As for hides, there are virtually zero places that will take them. We just don't have enough of them and we don't have the market for them here because they're all getting shipped in from Brazil where they're being processed with a lot less regulation. If you're wanting to do hides, you can do them yourself. I have tried. It is so hard. It is very, very hard work. There are a few places that will process them. I do not know of any in the area that will do cattle hides, but there are a few places that will do sheep hides. I'm trying to think of there is a tannery that does all natural hide processing. Um, in Wisconsin, called Jerichils Tannery, they're pretty cool. I would recommend that if you are wanting to get into selling hides or wool, that you attend some of the Michigan Sheep Producers Association events. They do shepherds weekends. The fiber festivals are also wonderful and there you just walk around and talk to people. There are sheep partners who have been doing this for 60 years. Some of them, one of the last mills in the country. I highly recommend the Michigan Sheep Producer Association. I'm going to put that link in the chat for you. If you go to that event, and then the fiber festivals also are everywhere and can be a huge knowledge resource for people. Also, whoever does your hides, they're amazing and hopefully we can get them some more business, definitely share that name wide because the hides are really, really hard work, but they are beautiful when they're done. Still have yet to find anyone to do cattle hides. If that is something that you have, people in Michigan want it. You're pretty much your only option right now is to have it processed by a taxidermist. I'll also say this is my last little tidbit, don't sleep on the pet food market. People pay a lot of money to feed their dogs, weird stuff. Feel free to reach out to me or Jon or any of the MSU Product Center folks. Yes, Wendy's on it. Pet Food Market. Navigate carefully, email me if you have questions. All right. Jon, well, I'll turn it back over to you. Thank you, everybody. I really appreciate what a great turnout. Thanks everyone for coming out today. I just want to say thanks again for everybody for coming out. Sam, thank you. This was a great material, great presentation. Thanks for being a part of the conference.