Las Vegas Livestock is located just outside of Las Vegas, and it is taking in everyone’s leftover food scraps to use as pig feed.
Sarah Stallard, Las Vegas Livestock’s Farm Manager, mentioned that reducing food waste is all about conserving resources.
“So we probably run our feed truck around four to five times a day and feed all of our pens and they have access to that feed 24/7,” said Stallard. “In the desert, it’s not sustainable for us to grow crops to feed hogs so we’re able to take what would be a wasted product, rotting in landfill and basically reenter it in the food system.”
Food scraps are thrown into a machine, designed to handle all kinds of food scraps, which then separates food from packages like yogurt cups and cases of crackers. Then, the large batch of cookers pasteurizes the leftover food. The whole process takes roughly 45 minutes from the scraps being dumped to cooked.
“The food in there gets cooked to basically kill any bacteria that the food might come with,” said Isai Martinez, Farm Supervisor.” Once it’s cooked and heated up, it comes out into that pipe and into our food trucks and heads down there to feed the pigs.”
Las Vegas Livestock received a permit from the Nevada Department of Agriculture to feed the food scraps to the animals.