Wisconsin's Meat-Processing Deserts: Where the Path from Pasture to Plate Breaks Down

A new study Michael Fields Agricultural Institute maps every licensed meat establishment in Wisconsin against the state's pasture landscape. A striking mismatch between where the grass is and where the processors are was found.

Join Dr. Success Okafor for a LIVE webinar on Thursday, August 20, from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. CDT, where he’ll share the key findings from the study, explore what they mean for farmers and rural communities, and discuss opportunities to strengthen Wisconsin’s local meat-processing infrastructure. RSVP HERE to get the Zoom link!

Ask a Wisconsin livestock farmer what stands between their pasture and a customer's plate, and you might expect to hear about weather, feed costs, or markets. But for farmers in more than a third of the state's counties, the answer is simpler and more stubborn: there is no facility in their home county licensed to process their animals for commercial sale.

Federal and state law require that livestock sold commercially (by the cut, to restaurants, grocery stores, or farmers market customers) be slaughtered at an inspected facility. No inspected processor, no sale. That makes processing access not just a convenience but a legal precondition for participating in local meat markets.

In a new study from Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, we mapped every licensed meat establishment in Wisconsin against the state's pasture landscape.

What we found is a striking mismatch between where the grass is and where the processors are.

What we found 

• 26 of Wisconsin's 72 counties, 36 percent of the state, have no inspected red-meat slaughter facility at all. We call these "absolute processing deserts."

• Those desert counties contain roughly 719,000 acres of pasture with no in-county option for inspected slaughter.

• Of Wisconsin's 286 licensed meat establishments, only 69 are actually inspected facilities that can slaughter red-meat livestock for commercial sale. The rest are custom-exempt plants or inspected businesses that don't slaughter.

• Even among counties that have a processor, many are stretched thin. In Lafayette County, a single facility corresponds to more than 108,000 acres of pasture, the highest "processing thinness" in the state. Vernon, Grant, and Barron counties show similar strain.

• Some county centers are more than 77 miles from the nearest inspected facility, and large parts of northern Wisconsin fall outside a 60-minute drive of any inspected processor.

Processing-desert typology by county: absolute deserts have no inspected slaughter facility; functional deserts have facilities stretched across large pasture bases. Sources: Wisconsin DATCP (2024); Tomer et al. (2017). 

"I was drawn to this research by a simple disconnect: diversified farming creates significant economic and environmental value, yet many livestock farmers lack reasonable access to inspected slaughter and meat-processing facilities. The central takeaway is that incentives and infrastructure must move together. We must reward the value diversified farms create while building the local market infrastructure farmers need to bring their products to consumers." -Dr. Success Okafor

Two kinds of desert 

The gaps aren't only where you'd expect. Northern Wisconsin's sparsely settled counties dominate the desert map, but several southeastern counties, including Kenosha and Racine, also lack any inspected processor, a possible peri-urban pattern that warrants further investigation, since the study did not test why facilities are absent there.

The Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin deserves special attention. Its rolling, erosion-prone hills are poorly suited to row crops but ideal for grass-based livestock: exactly the kind of diversified farming that builds soil, keeps land in perennial cover, and supports rural economies. Yet several Driftless counties are among the thinnest-served in the state. The region where grass-based agriculture holds the most promise is also where the infrastructure to support it is most stretched.

Why it matters 

Consumer demand for local, sustainably raised meat keeps growing, and many Wisconsin farmers want to add or expand livestock in diversified systems. But training programs, market development, and consumer enthusiasm can't overcome a missing slaughterhouse.

Where inspected processing is absent or overloaded, it can become the binding constraint: the one factor that blocks everything else.

This is a rural development issue as much as an agricultural one. Processing plants keep value-added activity and jobs in the communities that raise the animals. Six of the 26 desert counties have also lost population since 2020, a reminder that infrastructure gaps and rural decline can compound each other.

What can be done 

Our study points to concrete steps:

• Target federal processing investments (like USDA's Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program) using spatial data on where gaps are most severe.

• Expand capacity and pilot mobile slaughter units in thin-served Driftless counties.

• Use Wisconsin's state meat-inspection program to lower entry barriers for new small plants and support the butcher workforce.

• Treat processing investment as rural development policy, not just farm policy.

• Investigate what's happening in peri-urban counties before capacity there disappears for good.

"The map of Wisconsin's processing deserts is a map of opportunity: a guide to where a single well-placed facility could open the farm-to-market door for an entire county" -Chuck Anderas, Policy Director at Michael Fields Agricultural Institute

Learn More

To learn more about this new research, read the full working paper HERE.

Then join Dr. Success Okafor for a LIVE webinar on Thursday, August 20, from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. CDT, where he’ll share the key findings, explore what they mean for farmers and rural communities, and discuss opportunities to strengthen Wisconsin’s local meat-processing infrastructure. RSVP HERE to get the Zoom link!

RSVP For Success's LIVE WEBINAR on August 20th

This post summarizes a working paper under review at Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems: Okafor et al. 2026. “Processing Deserts and the Missing Middle: Mapping Meat-Processing Infrastructure Gaps Across Wisconsin’s Pasture Landscape.” This research is funded by the Resilience Coordinated Agricultural Project (RCAP), supported by AFRI SAS-CAP grant no. 2021-68012-35917 from USDA NIFA.