• Michael Gebert
  • Bartlett Durand at Black Earth Meats

Yesterday’s story was about a Wisconsin state agency’s alleged unfair treatment of artisanal meat producer Bolzano Artisan Meats. The story of Black Earth Meats isn’t about that kind of internecine agency warfare. It’s about regular people and competing visions of the kind of town they want to live in. And whether Wisconsin agriculture can survive when people decide they don’t want to live face to face with the reality behind the food they eat.

So having a meat processor on the main drag in town may not be the prettiest thing imaginable, but Black Earth Meats was a major employer. So those employees and their families might’ve been a good political constituency to keep it going.

“So I think what was happening was that they hit this little echo chamber where all of them are receiving calls from the same people, but then they think there’s this huge cacophony going on,” Durand says. “I kept trying to come to board meetings and trying to say here’s things I’ve done, here’s things I’ve addressed, and then the neighbors would come and say the exact same things they’d said the year before, and not acknowledging that anything had changed. Because what they told me, and they told me this directly to my face and later in a board meeting, was that there was not one thing I could do that would mitigate what they saw as a fundamentally inappropriate business in their neighborhood. Meaning, slaughter could not exist in their village.”

They also bought themselves a lawsuit. “You can’t say, You have the proper zoning, you’re grandfathered in, but, eh, we don’t like you any more,” he said. “That’s fundamentally illegal.” They had, of course, not only made it impossible for Black Earth Meats to continue as a slaughterhouse, but as he says, “No one in their right mind would buy the property for anything when the same neighbors are there, ready to get grumpy about any business.” But, even so, village officials were surprised when Durand turned around and sued the Village for everything he had put into the now marked property—$5.3 million. Which amounts to about $4,000 per man, woman, and child in the village.

Durand and some of his partners have found another place in another community, more industrial by nature, to begin the process of rebuilding Black Earth Meats. But he has to quickly raise a quarter of a million dollars to fund moving as much of Black Earth Meats’ equipment as they can; he has a Kickstarter for that purpose. They may be able to re-create the Black Earth Meats vision, but there’s still the problem of maintaining a rural economy in a state where an increasing number of people are unwilling to tolerate the hard facts of our food system.