Schrock Slaughter House running strong since the '70s

When she was 6, Bonnie Cash was allowed to stamp labels on paper packaging.

When she was 12, she could wash the floors of her family’s slaughterhouse in Gladys.

“I had to be 14 before I could use a knife,” she said.

Cash, whose maiden name is Schrock, is one of dozens of relatives who have grown up working in or around the Schrock Slaughter House on Pigeon Run Road. The family business was started in the late 1970s by Amos Schrock, who has now retired and whose son Mark runs the operation.

The slaughterhouse processes cows and the occasional hog throughout the year, but focuses on venison during deer season. This past season, the business processed 1,469 deer that were shot by area hunters, Mark Schrock said. The carcasses are butchered the way each customer wants — some prefer everything to be ground up or made into summer sausage and others want steaks.

Outside of deer season, farmers make appointments to bring their cattle or hogs for slaughtering. Schrock only has room for 20 cows per week in the chilling room, where carcasses are aged for about two weeks before the butchering process.

“Grandpa didn’t know when he built this place 30 years ago that we would get so busy,” said Cash, who is Mark Schrock’s niece.

It takes the crew about 30 minutes to butcher a half of a cow into piles of different types of steaks, roasts and ground beef, though that process depends on how the customer wants the meat cut.

Ultimately, Schrock said, a 1,000-pound cow will weigh 600 pounds after it is killed and cleaned. Of that, about two-thirds is meat.

Schrock always operates the saws, he said. “I’m kind of picky on how it’s cut and it’s hard to get someone to exactly do it like I do.”

A customer may ask for cuts to be extra lean or leave extra fat on, but it ultimately depends on the animal’s composition, said Carol Schrock, Mark’s sister-in-law.

While the slaughterhouse has been in business for about 30 years, it hasn’t been certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Cash said they are working toward that as a way to increase business and hope to have that certification in a few months.

In addition to being able to charge customers a little more for the USDA-inspected process, those who bring their animals to the slaughterhouse can sell their meat in new ways, including to restaurants and in smaller quantities than a quarter of a cow, Cash said. Right now, farmers who bring their animals in cannot sell the meat after it is processed and can only be served at home.

There also are many regulations for how the Schrock business can accept and process animals. Deer must be whole and still have the skin on it. Cattle must be alive and certain types of tissue, such as the spinal cord and brain, can’t be returned because of disease control. The leftovers, including bones and whatever tissue isn’t used, is sent to a rendering plant, which cooks the material down into various products like animal feed. The hides are picked up and sold for other uses.

Much of the Schrock family still lives nearby and many grew up working in the slaughterhouse, Cash said. Older children would work part time after school or on the weekends. But if a snowstorm closed schools and kept workers at home, others would be recruited to pitch in those days, Cash said.

Although Cash’s two children are 8 and 6½, they both have said they want to work in the slaughterhouse as well, she said. She hopes they won’t because it’s hard and laborious, “but if they want to do it, it’s fine with me,” she said.

Cash, 28, attended college at CVCC to study marketing, but decided after graduating that she’d rather work at the family business where her uncle is the boss.

“I enjoy it. I enjoy talking to the customers when they come in. I like doing the work. I’m used to it,” she said. “I never thought I was going to work here when I grew up. But there was nothing I wanted to do, so I kept on working in here.”