In June 2025, the US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service announced it will provide $12 million to state and tribal governments, research institutions and universities to control and prevent chronic wasting disease (CWD).

CWD is a fatal neurological disease affecting popular game animals including deer and elk that spreads through cervid-to-cervid contact and environmental contamination. APHIS provides funding and resources to study and manage CWD, especially in wild cervids. APHIS also operates a voluntary herd certification program for farmed cervids.

The funding announced in late June will support surveillance, testing, management and response activities for the disease. Approximately $6 million will be for projects to control CWD in farmed cervids, while the other $6 million will finance research and management of CWD in wild cervids.

Processors adhering to strict sanitation steps poses the most effective way to mitigate risk posed by CWD.

“Make sure you are either doing your game processing on different equipment, doing it on the same equipment after all your other red meat processing or making sure there is a cleaning and sanitizing step in-between,” said Nelson Gaydos, outreach specialist with the American Association of Meat Processors. “Some people even completely stop all red meat production for a period of time to focus on game processing,” he said.

Processor’s view

Luke Kerns is one of family owners of Edgewood Locker in Iowa , a custom processor that does deer processing. Kerns said processors face a number of ongoing issues in the game meat processing category:

• managing peaks and valleys of demand -- especially for labor
• lots of additional labor required per pound compared to other species because they come in so fast that there is lots of freezing and thawing happening from whole carcasses to boned out trimmings
• concern about long-term demand in the business due to these potential issues
• disease -- CWD, EHD (Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease) -- will herd size get smaller?
• fewer hunters, more land locked up with non-residents
• keeping metal fragments out of wild game meat can be a challenge, and a customer complaint when we don’t get it out.

Kerns said Edgewood Locker is seeing growth opportunity in a number of areas:

• expanding product offerings
• expediting offerings for out-of-state hunters
• being as flexible as possible for order drop-off and pickup
• after-hours self drop-off
• no appointment needed to drop off deer/meat
• not putting a cap on the number of deer accepted per day
• evening hours open for drop-off during busiest season
• open on Sundays for drop-off and pickup during busy season

One challenge and opportunity for Edgewood Locker is converting its seasonal game meat customers into year-round customers by finding ways to get wild game customers that only stop in two times per year (deer drop-off and pickup) to becoming year-round customers for Edgewood Locker’s retail meat products or beef/pork processing services.

“While we think this is a big opportunity, we struggle with it,” Kerns said.

www.provisoneronline.com   |  august 2025