ABATTOIRS seek efficiency by having big runs of stock, but that doesn’t encourage a diversity of livestock enterprises in rural areas that might otherwise support them.
That’s the situation that organic farmer David Booth finds at Cootamundra, NSW, and which he hopes to fix by developing a small service works near the town.
Mr Booth has been slaughtering small runs of stock - cattle, lamb and goats - at the Manildra abattoir at Cootamundra. Buronga Organics, the business he runs with wife Mary, supplies meat directly to butchers and consumers.
But Manildra has recently moved to full export accreditation. It hasn’t happened yet, but Mr Booth thinks that small private kills eventually won’t be accommodated.
His only option is to take his stock to Cowra, a three-hour return trip that sucks the profit from small consignments.
That’s got him investigating the feasibility of a small multi-species service abattoir capable of putting through 120 head of cattle a day, or 700-1000 sheep.
The budget is small, at about $5-$7 million. For that, an abattoir architect told Mr Booth, “you’ll have to be aggressive about costs, but it could be done”.
Mr Booth is aiming for a new construction, but whether the building is filled by an old or new business is still in question.
There are two small abattoirs in the Sydney Basin being pushed to extinction by regulation and urban encroachment, and one has expressed interest in moving the operation to Cootamundra.
The operating model is yet to be fixed, but Mr Booth is interested in the Northern Co-operative Meat Company at Casino in northern NSW - an operation begun in 1935, and one of the few to survive the rationalisation of abattoirs that sent more than 90 to the wall in the 20-odd years to 2005.
At the output end, he has received strong support - not just from producers in his position, but from wholesalers who want better control over slaughter.
The venture has already been pledged about a $1 million in investment. A Hong Kong investor has offered considerably more, but Mr Booth doesn’t want locals to lose control of the operation.
“We’ll be right back where we started from,” he said.
Or, it could add another species: an investor interested in resolving the acute shortage of horse knackeries in NSW has also offered substantial backing.
“It’s not for the fainthearted,” said Mr Booth, whose family has carried most of the cost and time to get the idea to its current chrysalis stage.
“But every week that goes by, someone comes up to me and says, ‘this needs to happen’.”