A big meaty issue

Are you getting all your meat back following a kill — or did it even belong to your animal in the first place? In the first of a two-part mini-series, Mandie Rickaby investigates whether smallholders are being short-changed by the system

- Mandie Rickaby

Sending livestock to slaughter can be one of the most fraught aspects of animal husbandry for smallholders. Abattoirs are very much the unglamorous end of the business, and it can be a struggle to entrust your animal’s life to someone whose job it is to end it. It’s an uneasy but crucial relationship and, while welfare concerns have been addressed to some extent by compulsory CCTV, the one question that never seems to go away is, how do I know that I am getting all my meat back?

Assessing the scale of the issue can be difficult to fathom. Abattoirs and meat processing facilities are regulated by the Food Standards Agency and local authorities, and there is no data collation on this type of complaint. Research by Country Smallholding revealed a mishmash of experiences: there were those with genuine grievances over mismatching beef forequarters and stray pig heads; those who could not praise their abattoir highly enough; and those with an innate suspicion or nervousness fuelled by rumours and a lack of knowledge of the quantity and type of meat to be expected from a carcase.

Apparently, the Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) regularly receives phone calls from small producers worried about meat matters.

According to senior business development manager Dick van Leeuwen: “We had one call from someone asking whether it was usual to receive loads of mince from a beef carcase and no fillet at all.”

THE CRISIS DEEPENS