Now Christmas is out of the way, the panic over whether our inexplicable national appetite for turkeys was going to be satisfied along with it, minds have moved on from the labour shortages in abattoirs and meat-processing plants that had caused all the pre-Christmas jitters. But is the problem solved? Nothing like it.
One of the pleasures of living and working down here in rural west Dorset for the past almost two years is that I’ve got to know plenty of local farmers both as suppliers and as customers at my pub. And what they tell me repeatedly is that the abattoir crisis is much more complicated and long-running than having a turkey on the table on 25 December.
One after another, smaller local abattoirs are shutting up shop. And it is not just a problem in this neck of the woods. A countrywide survey by National Craft Butchers recently reported that almost 60 per cent of such operations say they expect to close in the next five years.
The reasons given are the soaring cost of regulation and red tape. There just isn’t enough money in these businesses to keep up with the ever-growing list of requirements. And so far, despite pressure from the Campaign for Local Abattoirs, the Government is stalling over offering grants to soften the blow to these smaller operations to allow them to continue in a market dominated by the big players who serve the supermarkets.
Does it matter? After all, we know the amount of meat we eat impacts on climate change, so perhaps abattoir closures will increase the push for us all to become vegetarians. And with the country still experiencing a critical shortage of abattoir workers since the eastern Europeans who made up such a large proportion of them before Brexit, have left these shores, then it may also ease some of those pressures.
I couldn’t decide if the Environment Secretary was joking recently when he told MPs that the vacant posts might be filled by mothers of school-age children who could fit in a few hours in the abattoir between dropping off the kids in the morning and picking them up at 3.30pm.
Why all of this does matter, however, is that one of the best ways we can reduce our carbon emissions is by eating local. It is the guiding principle of all that I do. And to eat local, we need local slaughterhouses.
If we want to keep pushing up standards of animal welfare, then there are going to have to be more dedicated smaller-scale producers joining the market so we are not so reliant on either agro-industry suppliers or overseas imports. And for small producers, we need local abattoirs.
Such facilities have also long played a significant role in supplying the farm shops that we all have grown to love because they connect us with the land, and the meat boxes that enable discerning consumers to bypass long supply chains that fill supermarket shelves.
I realise, of course, that some readers who love a good leg of lamb would prefer not to think about what goes on in abattoirs. But you can care passionately about animal welfare at the same time as cooking and eating meat, and for me the accelerating closure of small local abattoirs is a sad example of us going in the wrong direction.
The three piglets that I have written about before in this column, given to me by a local farmer before Christmas, had been part of a group that had to wait weeks longer than intended to get a slot at an abattoir.
And farming organisations report that nationally as many as 120,000 pigs may have been killed because there just wasn’t any abattoir capacity for them.
If we are really going to do something about climate change, we have to reduce food waste as well as food miles. The slaughter of so many pigs is wastage on a colossal and heartbreaking scale, above all for the farmers who raised the pigs. The cost to them has been estimated at £130 million.
No wonder farmers often feel so misunderstood by politicians and the public alike. Right now my farmer mates keep telling me that the only person who understands them is Jeremy Clarkson – in his Amazon Prime Video series Clarkson’s Farm where he attempts to walk a mile in their shoes. Even the National Farmers’ Union has given him a prize.
Perhaps Clarkson is the one to make some progress on this issue. I can just see him in an abattoir playing up to the camera to make his point.
As told to Peter Stanford
