Short Creek Farm founders Jeff Backer and Dave Viola are on a mission to reestablish the connection between good farming, dedicated craftsmanship, and great food. They make sausage, salami, bacon, and other meat products by hand in small batches with exceptional ingredients sourced from independent farmers and craftsmen.

Shortly after they founded Short Creek Farm in 2015, Jeff and Dave applied for a USDA Value Added Producer Grant to develop a line of dry-cured salami. This was a planning grant that they worked with the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund to secure.

We also administer the USDA Local Meat Capacity (Local MCap) program grant. Through that program, Short Creek Meats — the farm’s sister entity that focuses on processing — was able to get a new automated slicer that allows them to increase production of their popular bacon. Before acquiring the slicer, Dave was slicing 1,000 pounds by hand in a day, all of which sold before it was even packaged.

As Short Creek Farm took off, they faced a significant challenge — securing adequate livestock processing services was a big headache. Scheduling far in advance when they didn’t know output was difficult. At the time, most of their production was being done in a small, state-inspected facility in New Hampshire. Plus, they were processing a lot of other products at other plants. In short, the logistics of processing their meat was limiting the business’s growth. They knew they needed their own space.

So, in 2020, they started working on a project to build out a large USDA-inspected processing plant. Naturally, they reached out to us to see how we might work together to bring the plan  to fruition. The buildout cost for the facility was set to be over $1 million, and they needed to secure a significant portion of that in loans.