OXFORD, Ohio – Andy Korb opened The Stockyards Packing, LLC in October 2023. It is a USDA custom processing facility. They specialize in cattle, hogs, sheep, goats and deer. While their business is new, the place has a history as a stockyard.

Previously, both Carmack Livestock and Tri-State Livestock were located at the site but the history, which Andy and his wife, Jessica, wanted to preserve, goes back longer than that.

“It was a stockyard, a daily market that started in 1958 as a hog-feeding operation,” Andy Korb said. An order buyer out of Cincinnati had a commission; he bought for Kahn and some of the other big packers. They needed a steady supply of hogs, so he bought a farm and built a state-of-the-art hog feeding floor up here as a commercial feeding unit.”

By 1962 they bought another local farm to supply the increased need for hogs and that was when they opened the stockyards on the property. The Korbs appreciated the nostalgia of the place, the old-school meat packing plants that were connected to stockyards.

They bought the property hoping to house their animals through the winter and maybe run a small trading business. Plans changed the next month when COVID hit; the auctioneering and contracting business pretty much shut down.

“We ramped up our freezer beef business but couldn’t get any kill dates and that kind of pushed me to explore new options,” Korb said.

They decided to build a state-of-the-art meat processing facility. Korb traveled the country visiting other processors. He talked to people and took measurements and videos. That paid off.

“We can do everything 100 percent in-house and we try to be as customer-service oriented as we possibly can,” Korb explained. “Everybody has a way of doing things and we put a little spin on it to make it our own and be as efficient as we can.

“Everything is vacuum-sealed; we don’t do any paper wrapping,” he said “We don’t run our bulk burger into a chub, a round tube. Our bulk burger is a vac-sealed square pack so it stacks neatly inside your freezer. We have a smokehouse so we can do all of our smoked products here.”

They raise cattle and sheep and buy some locally. They buy poultry from Kings Poultry in Bradford, Ohio, another family-owned business.

Getting started with the inspection process was confusing at first but the district supervisor from USDA and the federal veterinarian have been helpful, and key in the success of their being operational and successful, Korb said. They have two levels of inspection, federal and custom exempt.

“If you want to resell product on your own by the pieces, for example, if you want to sell two ribeye steaks they need to be USDA inspected and we can do that through this facility,” he said. “If you just want to sell custom to where you bring us a beef and you sell a quarter to four people that would follow the custom exempt.”

If you’re just looking for something for dinner, the retail store offers plenty of choices. They sell lamb, beef steaks, pork burgers and more. They have smoked products, bacon, smoked pork chops, ham, 15 flavors of snack sticks, sausage, and 26 flavors of brats.

“If people want something we don’t have we are willing to make it,” Korb said. We figure it out by trial and error. If it doesn’t work, we regroup and try again.”

Also, if you drop an animal off for slaughter, there are no worries about getting that same critter back for the freezer, Korb said. When the animals are unloaded, the owner gets a live weight. They are tagged right away. Once harvested, they have a carcass tag that stays with that carcass throughout the process.

“I have 44 cameras set up in the facility so if an animal loses its tag I can go back and watch cameras and make sure whose is whose,” Korb said.

The Korb family’s goal with their business is to serve their community meat packing needs, to have an intentional focus on the community, and provide education for the youth through county extension programs such as 4-H and FFA and homeschool groups that tour the facility.

The Stockyards offers tours and demonstrations. For information, visit theyardsoh.com or call 513-646-2644.