Buyers at Saturday’s Junior Livestock Sale will have a tough time finding a local butcher if they haven’t made arrangements already.

“All the local processing plants are booked up, all the way into December, and some are into January already,” said Joe Bridges, chairman of the sale committee.

Sale leaders are working with Matt Froehlich, owner of Matt’s Custom Meats in Saint Anthony, Idaho, and the business “is willing to take any of the animals that come through the sale or any of the companion animals that people have.”

“We will put them on a truck Sunday morning after the sale, Bridges said. “There is no charge to get them shipped to Idaho.”

Lane Friedly has donated his time, truck and trailer to transport the livestock, and Matt’s Custom Meats will pay for the fuel for the truck to get there and back.

“He's got a feedlot that will drop the animals off and then he will take care of them per instructions for everybody,” Bridges said. “Three to four weeks later, he has a refrigerated cargo trailer that he will bring all the meat back to Powell.”

Buyers will then meet at the Northwest College Ag Pavilion to pick up their meat.

“So all they have to do is just pay normal processing fees to Matt,” Bridges said.

If a buyer wants an animal processed and doesn’t already have a date established at a local processing plant, “we encourage them to go down this path,” he said.

While it’s typical to have some difficulty getting an animal processed this time of year — “there’s just not enough places,” Bridges said— the pandemic has made it especially challenging.

Instead of going to the grocery store to buy meat, people are trying to get their own animals processed. Some animals also were sold at low prices “because they couldn't find a place to take them and they needed them off the feed floor, Bridges said.

“An animal that's ready to go now can't wait until December to be processed — the meat will not be the quality that it should be,” he said. “We're tickled to death that Matt [Froehlich] stepped up to the plate for us on this and made this work so that we could then send a semi load over there.”