Consider your local abattoir
Jayne Duveen
At the end of January, Tottingworth Farms Abattoir, located in Heathfield will end their essential link in our food chain. Although essential, no-one likes to talk about how or where the animals we eat are slaughtered. However, if each of us is going to share in the responsibility for the way our animals are husbanded, from their beginning to their end, we must be aware of the role and the need for the success of the small-scale, local abattoir. Why? More and more small abattoirs are closing at a rate of 10% every year. If this continues, farms like ours will be forced out of business as we will have nowhere close by to slaughter our animals. For us, animal welfare is a priority, and we would not feel comfortable with the idea of them travelling over long distances to the nearest and what could become, rare abattoir.
Tottingworth has been in operation since the 1960s when every high street had at least one butcher and the average farm size was 70 acres (now it is 600 acres nationally. In the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the average size is still 100 acres). We have been using Tottingworth since we began farming over 25 years ago.
There are three main reasons which lie behind the closure of abattoirs. The first is the inappropriate and burdensome regulation set by the Food Standards Agency. The second is the mass exodus of fully qualified slaughtermen due to low morale and Brexit and the third, the escalating production costs.
Regulation set by the Food Standards Agency has been designed for large scale abattoirs which need to meet the requirements for exporting meat overseas as well as supplying the domestic market.
The FSA has, at least, owned up to the fact that the system designed for the ‘Bigger Players’ does not fit the smaller operations and that through a 5-year programme they hope to be able to deliver a risk based proportional approach to regulation in the future. While some measures will require legislative change there are others that could be implemented now which if implemented could make significant difference for our much-needed local abattoir. Five years would be too late.
Surely with the war between Russia and the Ukraine and ever-increasing evidence of climate change, food security should be close to all of our hearts.
We urge everyone buying our meat to send an email or a letter to your local MP to highlight the reasons why you source locally produced food i.e., why it is important to you (quality, traceability, supporting local farmers, helping the local rural economy & local environment etc.) and to say how valuable your local abattoir is to enable this to continue. Ministers will respond more positively if they have had lots of letters so every letter is worth it. Your MP will send your letter on and they believe that for every letter received 10 people thought of writing and never did.
If you do not know who to email you can put in your postcode here and your local MP’s email will come up.
We have been fortunate to find another abattoir at Henfield that is not that much further away from us than Tottingworth. So, for us, in spite of the additional transport costs, we can and will continue. This is not the case for hundreds of other farmers that stretch right across Sussex and Kent.
Although we can continue, we must not become complacent. We must ensure that the abattoirs left are protected and continue and also the possibility of a new abattoir to replace Tottingworth is fully explored.
Already there has been a great deal of work done by a group known as LARK (Local Abattoirs Are Key). If you are interested in learning more about the work being done then please contact Guy MacNaughton either by email guymacnaughton@gmail.com or phone on 07476 312243.
We will be putting a petition in the shop for any customer that would like to sign it.
