During the Wyoming Food Coalition Conference this morning Amanda Winchester spoke about wanting to use the meat processing facility at Central Wyoming College to provide all the beef for the campus.
“Once we get going we want to provide meat for our whole facility,” Winchester said, who is also a professor at CWC in Agriculture and Meat Science.
Winchester’s department is now hiring a meat lab manager to slaughter cattle on-site as a learning tool to train the next generation of butchers, ranchers, and meat scientists.
She says the goal is not to compete with local butchers around Riverton but to teach and provide another outlet for ranchers to bring their cattle to be locally slaughtered.
The first semester of on-site learning this upcoming January will include aspects of food safety, how to slaughter, and how to humanely inspect the animal as well as USDA requirements.
“So we have a certificate program that the students then learn a semester long curriculum that teaches them everything,” she said and that the students can get an associates degree in Meat Science and Food Technology.
Winchester said that the new program is all about producing local food safely and growing the local economy.