Local livestock producers combine forces and look at how to build a slaughterhouse.

In pursuit of anything that might make milk, week-old lambs at Monkeyflower Ranch in Prunedale will suck on pens, fingers and even scrunched denim.

The adorable herd is accustomed to being bottle-fed by proprietor Rebecca King and her staff. That’s because the young lambs will drink about $50 worth of cow’s milk in the six weeks before they’re put out to pasture, or $200 worth of sheep’s milk from their moms. King sets that more valuable milk aside to make cheese and yogurt, which fetch higher prices than lamb meat.

King is one of about 20 Monterey Bay-area livestock producers struggling with high costs of producing meat, but interested in scaling up. She’s joined a committee exploring how to open a local slaughterhouse and processing plant.

The nearest options today are a mobile slaughterhouse in Paso Robles, where it costs King almost $200 to kill and butcher a lamb she can sell for $400, or Fresno, where she processes about 25 pigs a year.

“There are just very few options, and they’re very expensive,” King says.

“Monterey Bay is kind of a sweet spot for a new facility.”

King joined a discussion in January at the EcoFarm conference, hosted by the nonprofit Ecological Farming Association. The group, calling itself the Central Coast Meat Producers Co-op, is working on its first step, funded by a $25,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's local food promotion program.

That step is a feasibility study, including a survey on how much animal protein is produced, and by whom, in Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties.

Luis Sierra is assistant director for the California Center for Cooperative Development in Davis, which assists in developing rural co-ops across the state. His team is canvassing about 60 livestock producers for stats on how much they produce, and whether they’d like to scale up. The big surprise so far, he says, is an abundance of poultry producers.

“Monterey Bay does have a vacuum,” Sierra says. “It’s kind of a sweet spot for thinking about a new facility. Relatively, California has a lot less facilities than it did 30 years ago, but you see a bunch in the Central Valley, north of the I-80 corridor, and down in Paso Robles.”

Sierra expects to complete the feasibility study by July. Then begins the more challenging process of creating a blueprint, selecting a site and financing it, as well as getting USDA approval.

A bricks-and-mortar plant is probably years out. Until then, Sierra is working with EcoFarm Executive Director Ken Dickerson to create an interim co-op. The idea is to form partnerships among farmers like King, who could share the costs of a truck to deliver livestock to existing Central Valley slaughterhouses.