While we are all accustomed to buying meat at the grocery store, there are still a number of people in St. Clair County that are getting their beef and pork the old fashioned way. Since the 1970s the Dollar family in Odenville has been slaughtering and butchering pigs, cows as well as processing deer for local residents who want meat from around the corner instead of from a large stockyard that could be thousands of miles away.

Though the trend of Americans to buy local produce and meat is increasing, the family’s operation may soon become a thing of the past, since it is now the only all-inclusive slaughterhouse and butcher operation left in the county and farmers are increasingly limiting the number of livestock they raise because of soaring cost to raise animals.

As recently as the 1990s, there were three slaughterhouses in the county with one in the Wolf Creek area near Pell City, one in the Coal City-Ragland area and the Dollar’s operation in Odenville.

But as times change and the costs rise, Phillip Dollar, owner-operator of Dollar Meats, looks to the horizon and is sometimes uncertain what the future will be for localized slaughterhouses.

Dollar has seen a reduction in business from local hog farmers in recent years, but he is still committed to providing the services those farmers and hunters in the county want and need.

“It’s a good business,” Dollar said. “But it’s a type of business that is going by the wayside. Within the next 15 years, you’d be hard pressed to find a place like this to take your meat.”

Dollar said that he believes that the housing boom is cutting back on the number of family farms in the area because many farmers are selling their land to be developed into subdivisions. “I remember being in my teens and there were many people who raised hogs here in the county. You’d be hard pressed to find a hog here in St. Clair County.”

Many hog farms in the state and across the nation are now located in areas where corn is being grown in order for the hog farmers to cut back on the cost of shipping corn from the fields to their stockyards.

“We used to buy hogs locally to slaughter, process and sell,” Dollar said. “But the hog business is something that is increasingly difficult to be in now because hogs are an animal that have to be fed from the time that they are weaned. They don’t get to graze in pastures like other animals. So it’s a hard thing to make money in right now.”

The prices of beef and pork are not set by the farmer, it is set by the markets and because of that many farmers are having to cut back on the number of hogs and cows they raise or get out of the business entirely.

Dollar has to travel over 100 miles to get hogs, whereas he used to buy them from a local farmer. The person he buys hogs from is also a corn farmer and does not have as high an overhead as farmers who have to import corn.

Dollar Meats is a small, family-owned operation that does its beef and pork production by appointment only.

Whenever it is time to slaughter an animal, a state inspector is on hand to inspect the slaughter process at Dollar’s operation. The inspector oversees the slaughtering process and performs checks such as examining the animal’s entrails to check for possible contamination.

Once that process is complete, the meat gets a state seal of approval for it to be butchered.

After spending the night in the cooler, the meat is then processed by Dollar and his crew. The state inspector keeps a close watch on how quickly the animal is processed.

“Everything we process—if it is to be sold—is usually sold within a week and is not sold any more than two weeks after it has been processed,” Dollar said. “Most of what we process is grown right on the farms. Everything we sell is grown right here in Alabama.”

In addition to slaughtering and processing animals for locals, Dollar Meats also processes and sells breakfast meats. Its sausage and bacon is sold in stores and restaurants around the county. “Sausage is our main business when it comes to stuff that we’ll sell,” Dollar said.

Though breakfast meats are an important part of Dollar Meats, slaughtering and processing is still the mainstay of the Dollar family’s operation. In order to keep the doors open, Dollar processes a lot of deer meat. He estimates that almost half of his processing is deer meat.

“It used to be that deer season didn’t have a big effect on us,” Dollar said. “When I was younger and my dad was running the business, if we processed 50 deer in a season, we thought we’d done pretty good. Now, sometimes I’ll get in 50 deer a day.”

Because of the decrease in family farms in the county and the increase in hunters bringing their deer meat to Odenville to be processed, Dollar has had to stagger the scheduling of the slaughter and processing of hogs and cows in order not to be swamped with more than his small operation can handle.

Winter is traditionally the biggest season for slaughtering animals. In the days before large refrigeration units, it was cold enough during winter to slaughter and processes an animal without having the meat spoil.

“We’ve finally got people where [farmers will] work around deer season,” Dollar said. “We don’t make that much more money on deer. If we could do deer, hog and beef processing at the same time, it’d be different. But in order to get the deer business, you’ve got to trade off the beef and hogs.”

Dollar, who was raised in rural St. Clair County, talked about the change in American’s diet from the traditional fair to a more modern diet that sometimes includes eating local produce and meat. “So many people are eating out nowadays and are getting away from what it used to be like,” he said. “But it’s coming back to that a lot with people eating more organic vegetables and people wanting to eat meat that was raised close to where they are. I hear a lot about people who are going to a local farmer and asking, ‘Can I buy some beef from you?’ or they’ll go to the sale barns and buy a cow or even buy beef from a farmer that has had their meat processed.”

Dollar raises some cattle each year to be processed and sold to locals who want to eat beef that is not raised in a large, industrial stockyard. But he said that because of the high prices of corn, fuel and fertilizer, that he has had to tell some of his regular beef customers that he may not be doing that for much longer. “Corn is just tearing up anybody who is in the feeding business,” he said. “The fuel is just killing the farmers and the fertilizer is, too.”

He said that there are a lot of farmers from the old school that are still raising cattle, but that the numbers are dwindling and that is what is hurting small processing plants like Dollar Meats.

“You still have a lot of older people that still raise cattle and might kill two or three cows a year and give to their families,” he said. “I have several people who might kill as many as four a year to give away to their kids. But when that generation is gone and the cost of fertilizer and feed sets in, then the older generation might be tempted to say, ‘Well, I just can’t do this anymore.’”