If you've heard that the UK has a serious lack of slaughter facilities you heard right, in 2022 there were only 161 red meat slaughterhouses and only 50 for poultry. Not all of these however cater to small livestock keepers such as myself. Before I started rearing chickens for meat I spent a good few weeks desperately searching for an abattoir that would take my future birds. The whole business rested on being able to find one, as a first generation farmer begging and borrowing land I had no yard or buildings to speak of and could hardly start erecting my own facility with little finance or resource.
For a while it was looking dubious, of the 50 poultry slaughterhouses there aren't many within a couple of hours of West Yorkshire and most of those you can discount for size, as I remember one plant in Bradford told me I had to put in a minimum of 10,000 birds a time.
A few weeks later one of the many people I'd reached out to in the industry got back to me and put me in touch with an abattoir that took small numbers of chicken less than an hour away. Finally project chicken was go.
Every season for the past 3 and half years all of my chickens have been to the same slaughterhouse. I take them in on a week day morning, they travel in poultry travel crates, nowadays in a trailer, in the early days in the back of my truck! Once they get there they are processed, plucked and eviscerated before being chilled down in a big walk in fridge. The next day I return to collect my whole birds ready for butchering and dressing.
Sometimes I would ask for the butchers there to butcher my chickens, this was a little extra per bird but worth it as I'm not the best butcher and I certainly didn't start out as one. What would take them 1 hour would often take me 4 or 5 so the butchery option to begin with was a real bonus especially on busy weeks. Nowadays I'm a lot quicker and more skilled with it, that said butchering is a major job, it takes time and everything has to be packaged, weighed and labelled so if I have 100 chickens to do it's a good 3 days work. This year I'm rearing 1000 chickens for meat, about 600 of those will be butchered by me throughout the season.
Unfortunately the butchery at the slaughterhouse wasn't always up to standard. It was never fine or elegant work, I would recieve chicken breast back with cuts nearly all the way through, sometimes my birds would have scorch marks on the skin, apparently from the scalder not being at temperature and I cant tell you the amount of broken and bruised wings I've got back over the years. Many hours were also spent plucking left over feathers and ultimately I've had a unknown amount of chicken that was set aside as unsalable because of iitsstate after processing. This was incredibly frustrating especially after I have taken the time to care for these birds and give them a good life and always handled them with such care. Nevertheless, with the lack of abattoirs being what it is, what is a small farmer such as myself to do, I was stuck, that was my only option so I had to make the best of it.
I was making the best of it until a couple of weeks ago when my birds got pulled up for being 'dirty', poultry is required to be 'clean' inside for slaughter. That is, they like you to restrict feed for up to 24 hours before the birds go in to give their systems time to empty out. Under my animal welfare certification I am allowed to withdraw feed for no longer than 8 hours before slaughter unless the chickens go into their travel crates the night before. This is something I do practice however with my birds being on pasture I could restrict feed but I couldn't stop them pecking and foraging bits of grass, soil and insects. This ordinarily shouldn't be a problem, you see there is a way to eviscerate a bird in a 'clean' way if you know how so that you don't pierce the digestive tract of the chicken. Unfortunelty this wasn't the way it was done at my slaughterhouse, the process sounded somewhat industrial, 'they get cut open and big tube sucks everything out' also a reason why I've rarely been able to get my giblets back. Upon asking what more I could do to ensure my birds digestive systems were as empty as possible, the vet in attendance informed me I was at risk of the whole batch being thrown away, and it was a problem on the processing side and there was nothing I could do about it.
The next week I did my best to get around the problem of the week before by putting my chickens in their travel crates the night before slaughter instead of the morning of. That way they definitely couldn't consume anything in the hours leading up to being taken. The next day like all the weeks before I went to collect my lovely batch of plump fresh chickens. Disaster, out of the 75 I took in 25 had been thrown away, another 25 cut into it for 'inspection'. How could this be? I was told my birds had a serious case of cellulitis, a bacterial infection caused by bacteria entering a wound. The abattoir would have me believe my birds had cellulitis because when they are pasture raised 'they sit on wet ground' Something was amis..
In my nearly 4 years of rearing and nearly 2000 chickens I had never been pulled up for cellulitis or had an issue with it. When I got back to the farm I went out to the field to check the rest of my chickens. You see that week I had taken half a batch, 75 out of a group of 150 so I still had 75 birds out in the field that had been reared in the same group the exact same way. As I expected there wasn't a mark, bruise, or blemish on them, they were all in beautiful condition and something just didn't add up. Why all of a sudden was there a problem, if my birds hadn't got cellulitis what else could it be? Had I missed something? Maybe it was crating the birds the night before that had caused bruising? But I've seen other pasture raised producers do this with no problem. It was hard to come to any definite conclusion and by this point i was starting to get suspicous.
The week after it was time to take the other 75 in that batch. When I arrived there were two chickens walking around the yard, my chickens I was told, that had escaped slaughter the week before, but I'll come back to that in a minute. All 75 chickens passed inspection, not one of them had being pulled up for cellulitis. It proved my theory, the week before it couldnt have been cellulitis otherwise ones in this batch would have it too. I started asking questions, I was shown pictures of my birds the week previous that had been thrown away, in the picture I saw about 10 birds, some seriously battered and bruised all up their breast. I waited around to speak to the vet (something that was frowned upon). Upon talking to the vet it became clear that he was incredibly nervous to talk to me, almost intimated by my presence. I requested the report from the week before for my 25 missing birds, after a bit of he said she said, I was told he could not send it me directly only to the abattoir for them to then send it to me. By this time I already being told I was a nuisance and to not call anyone or to enquire about anything as it would draw attention to myself and lead to me being penalised byt the system. At this point I was still confused, I couldn't prove anything one way or another so I waited.
The report for the slaughter and disposal of my 25 birds never arrived. That evening all the pieces fell into place in my mind. There was something seriously fishy going on and I was being lied to. I arrived at the abbatoir the next morning to collect the remaining 75 chickens, the ones that hadn't been thrown away. When I got there I picked them up, paid for the service and went to see the boss. I asked for the report to be sent through again as it hadn't arrived. I mentioned that the birds I collected that morning hadn't got cellulitis so how could it be that the week before the others had such a serious case of it. I was told I had counted wrong, I was told I was a nuisance, that I was overthinking, that birds could recover that quickly! I also mentioned that when two of my chickens are let loose during the process I expect them to be caught again and for them not to replace my escaped chickens with two of thier barn reared chickens, yes that did actually happen. A bit like the time I asked for my chicken necks back to go in a pack of giblets with some christmas birds and I got given more necks than the amount of chickens I'd taken in! I dont have a clue who those other necks belonged to or where they came from. Even though I was being lied to and disrespected I was in quite a calm mood that morning so didn't argue and just left with my birds. I left finally knowing in my mind that something had occured and the slaughterhouse and thier staff were covering it up.
I got back to the farm to bucther and package my 75 chickens, some of which were in a terrible state, marks, broken wings, skin ripped, the usual carelessness I had come to expect.
I will never know what went on or what happened to my birds that week. I shall never get the money back that has been wasted and thrown away not only on those 25 birds but all the others I couldn't sell in the past due to them being handled so poorly. Now I know why most smaller poultry farmers slaughter their own and I shall never trust someone else with my birds again. Luckily on farm slaughter is something I was already working towards, but we now have 5 weeks until the next batch of chickens are ready to complete our on farm set up. It's going to be a push and a big challenge. With things the way they are I struggle to see how young entrant farmers especially from outside the industry like myself can really make a go of it if they cant trust the system they rely on.
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