Farm Director, KC Sheperd, is talking with Dave Carter about his involvement with the Flower Hill Institute. Carter is a director of the Flower Hill Institute and works to provide technical assistance to those who are working to expand and develop meat and poultry processing facilities.
Flower Hill Institute is a Native-owned, community-directed nonprofit. The objectives include preserving and enhancing cultural resources, preparing youth to inherit leadership, improving economic self-sufficiency, agriculture, food sovereignty and security, and improving outcomes to climate change.
Flower Hill also works nationally, doing outreach and providing technical assistance on the USDA Meat and Poultry Processing Technical Assistance program and the USDA Farm Service Agency Outreach, Education, & Technical Assistance program.
“We have been out working with folks all the way from Puerto Rico to the Northern Mariana Islands who are doing a whole variety of really innovative things,” Carter said.
Carter said by visiting HERE, individuals can fill out a form requesting assistance from USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) Technical Assistance program for expansion of their meat and/or poultry processing capacities.
“We circle back with them within 24 hours to generally say, ‘We need more information,’” Carter said. “We will set up a phone call or a Zoom with them to find out what they need. Then we try and connect them with the right resources.”
One of the biggest challenges Carter said he has seen along the way with processing facilities is finding a qualified workforce.
“You can’t take somebody off the line at a big JBS or Excel facility,” Carter said. “They are an assembly line worker; they are doing one thing all day long. We need to have trained people who can be back on the harvest floor one day, in the processing room, or behind a retail counter one day. We are working to make sure that we train the workforce that can go into those plants.”
