Grand opening Friday: Little Acres Meat Plant open for business in Byron

Like the fabled Phoenix rising from the ashes, the Little Acres Meat Plant near Byron has been rebuilt and is open for business – five years after a fire claimed the structure.

The facility one mile northeast of Byron on U.S. 14A will be the site of a grand opening this Friday, Sept. 25, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. that will include a ribbon-cutting ceremony conducted by the Lovell Area Chamber of Commerce, tours of the plant, free hamburgers catered by the Get Loaded food truck and a raffle for a half a pig, cut to the winner’s specifications.

Folks attending the grand opening can find Little Acres Farm on the south side of the highway where two mailboxes are located. There will be signs to direct people to the location.

Co-owner Rebecca Bates said the Little Acres Farm operation she runs with husband Martin, family members and employees has three operations: a creamery, a feed mill producing livestock feed and the meat plant.

Bates invites people to “come see us and see what we’re doing.”

The site of Little Acres Farm was the Gary Stevens Dairy for many years, Bates said, before she and Martin purchased the farm. They first operated the meat plant in Byron as Marketplace Meats from 2006 to 2010, then relocated the meat plant to the farm, operating the dairy and meat plant in the remodeled Stevens dairy barn.

In 2020, the Bates family was awarded a state grant to expand the facility, but on February 28, 2021, a fire burned the large facility to the ground. Starting over, Martin and Rebecca first concentrated on the creamery, then added the feed mill in 2023.

“We were sort of in the process of (building) the creamery, and we’d been milking cows for 20 years, and then after the meat plant burned down and just the way things were going, we decided to push the creamery idea. I had traveled clear back east and looked at a lot of creameries, and so we kind of picked that up and got that going.

“It’s sort of always been going since we milked cows, and then in 2020 we really started doing a little bit more when COVID hit, and there were food shortages. People were asking us for stuff, and so we kind of built that. But then after the fire, we pushed that more. It was, like, ‘OK, I guess we’ll get this going more,’ and so we have a delivery service. We deliver throughout the Big Horn Basin -- all of our milk and dairy products.”

Rebuilding the meat plant wasn’t easy. It started with a GoFundMe fundraising effort and some self-financing, and after being scammed out of money by a provider of AAC block from Montana, the family moved forward as best they could.

“We just started building back as much as we could, as we could afford it, and we had a couple people then invest into it. But really, it was May of 2025, and we had someone that told us they wanted to help us build it.

“We’ve done all of the building ourselves with our own construction company, and then we had to go through all the state procedures for getting it inspected.”

Certification

Bates said the meat plant is currently custom exempt and will be state certified within two weeks when final paperwork is finished. She described the difference as:

“With a custom exempt plant, you can bring your animal to me. We can butcher it, and you can take it home and put it in your freezer. With state (certification), you can bring your animal to me. I can cut it up. Now you can sell it. It can go in restaurants. It can go in stores throughout Wyoming. So that’s the difference between the two.”

She said she would like to be able to see meat retail in the future while noting that many Little Acres Farm products are already available at Wild Edge in Lovell.

Bates said the new plant is much larger than the previous facility.

“We have two cut floors, which gives us the ability to continue to do wild game during hunting season and do domestic at the same time,” she said. “A lot of other plants have to shut down domestic in order to do game. We don’t have to do that. We have two coolers, so our capacity to hang meat (is greater). We have so much more room.

“It’s really a great facility. Our inspectors tell us it’s probably the nicest facility in the state, so that’s a positive. And we’ve designed it to be able to do poultry at some point, which the State of Wyoming needs because we don’t have that in the state. So the State has seen our plans on that, and they’re good with that. Our capacity is so much bigger than before.”

There are more possibilities for growth in the future, Bates said, noting that the State of Wyoming is working to make it more feasible for school districts to buy local meat.

“We’ve been approached to see if we’d be willing to take care of that end of it, to cut it and deliver it,” she said. “So our big goal is to, of course, keep stuff local, so that the local ranchers and farmers can bring their stuff and sell it right here instead of just taking their beef to the sale barn. They’re going to get better money if they sell their own meat. That’s our big thing that we’re going to push, having everything local.”

Meanwhile, Bates remains active in the effort to improve food security in Wyoming as a member of Wyoming Food Coalition, recently receiving an award from Wyoming First Lady Jennie Gordon through the Wyoming Hunger Initiative.

“I think it’s going to be good, because you’ll see that we’re going to make some good changes and really push the food security throughout the state,” she said. “We produce like 3% or something of our food in Wyoming; everything else is imported. So we do have the ability to do more, but it’s just not happening. So we’re going to start some initiatives to push more food security. I think everybody saw during COVID how quickly things change. And so, yeah, just helping to move food throughout the state and help producers and consumers kind of come together and realize that the food is right in your area, so yeah, that’s what we’re pushing.”