Abattoirs put the bite on poultry

SMALL poultry producers say they have had to stop producing chicken meat due to a lack of processing facilities in the state.

Ingham’s and Nichols Poultry have processing facilities at Sorell and Sassafras, respectively, but are only available for chicken meat producers who supply those companies.

Outside of the big two, there are only a handful of smaller processors in Tasmania.

Rosella Roost co-owner Paula Dos Santos said a lack of abattoirs had contributed to its decision to stop producing meat about three years ago.

Now it relies entirely on eggs as their revenue source.

“The abattoir situation is definitely a bottleneck for small producers,” Ms Dos Santos said.

“The demands and red tape to set up your own abattoir are very high.

“The investment is simply not worth it for a small producer like us.”

Ms Dos Santos said when Rosella Roost produces poultry meat, it only sells a limited number of birds directly to restaurants.

“We still hold the licence in case we decide to go back with it online,” she said. “But for now, we are just sticking with pasture-raised birds.”

Calum Jacobsen and partner Samara Piluris-Sheehy ran Broadchurch Farm in the Southern Midlands between 2017 and 2020.

“When we were producing poultry, we were a very small farm producing batches of 300 to 400 birds a month,” Mr Jacobsen said.

“There were only two options for poultry producers outside of Ingham’s and Nichols.”

Broadchurch Farm used Dan’s Poultry Farm at Latrobe to process its meat.

However, Mr Jacobsen said he had to transport the chickens himself because the facility at Latrobe was so small-scale.

“One of the many reasons we stopped producing was the amount of labour it took to get there and back.”

On processing days, he would be working 16 to 18 hours.

“That would get a product to market, but that was not sustainable for us,” Mr Jacobsen said.

“We’d pack our chooks into crates and load them on to a trailer the day before. Then I would get up at 3am to hit the road and take our chooks to the abattoir at dawn.

“I’d stay around to help pack the birds all day because they were tight on labour, so I wasn’t hitting the road until 5pm.”

Mr Jacobsen, who now works as a communication officer at Sprout Tasmania, said the only other small-scale poultry abattoir he knew of was at Scottsdale.

“That’s a really big roadblock to anyone who wants to produce chicken outside of the North.

“I speak to so many people in the South that regularly want to be growing ethical, small-batch pastured meat chickens but realise that’s not a sustainable option,” he said.

“Even if we had one processor down here that was capable of doing meat chickens, that would be really good for small producers.”