Confused about Australian butchery laws

Discussion in 'Breeding, Raising, Feeding and Caring for Animals' started by meatshare, Aug 18, 2013.

  1. meatshare

    meatshare New Member

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    Hi there,


    I am interested in perhaps starting a meat CSA or something similar, and I am trying to work out what is legal in Australia, and what isn't.


    As far as I can tell, if you have your herd harvested on-site by a mobile butcher, the meat cannot be sold, or leave the property(?).


    However, if it is sent to an abattoir (not something I want to be doing ethically), it can be sold.


    Can anyone verify this?


    One way around it I can see is to start a meatshare CSA, similar to a raw milk herdshare. Members would co-own an animal before it is slaughtered, and therefore the meat would belong to them. But the thing that I am stuck on, is can it legally leave the property?


    Any ideas would be much appreciated, cheers.
     
  2. ecodharmamark

    ecodharmamark Junior Member

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    G'day meatshare, welcome to the PRI Forum.

    Generally speaking, the retail meat industry in Australia is tightly regulated at the state/territory level. For example, see:

    https://www.foodauthority.nsw.gov.au/industry/industry-sector-requirements/meat

    As an aside, perhaps you could work with an existing, regulated on-farm enterprise (for examples, see: links below), and extend their retail model to include CSA?

    https://www.freerangebutcher.com.au/

    https://www.erindalefarm.com.au/ (this is where we get the bulk of our meat)

    Cheerio, Markos
     
  3. debonatrek

    debonatrek Junior Member

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    having this issue myself. In WA can only kill your own animals on rural properties, animals buthered at home are for home use only, you can't sell or swap. (your lamb for my chicken) or give it as payment for services rendered. But you can give away to friends and family
     
  4. Callum EHO

    Callum EHO Junior Member

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    If you want the meat to leave the property then the animal has to be transported to a licensed facility where it will be inspected for disease, then it can be taken to a butcher, cut up and distributed.

    If the animal is killed on the property and the meat stays on the property then if the meat is diseased then it is obvious who takes the blame.

    The time before these laws there was a whole heap of illness many people have forgotten about these days but some of the infectious agents are still found by meat inspectors. Some of the illness is not immediate. If the meat also happens to not be quite cooked properly then imagine having to pass tapeworms up to 10 mitres in length into the toilet. Not really life threatening but unpleasant!!
     
  5. Curramore1

    Curramore1 Junior Member

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    The trouble here to sell meat this way are the food miles and the stress factor. To sell the meat legally you must have the beast killed away, so here it has to travel 100 km from my farm to the slaughter facility, where it will wait in lairage off feed overnight or longer with a heap of other stranger animals it will be frightened of, or aggressive to, then in the morning will be fire hosed to remove hide dirt and faeces and then knocked with a captive bolt gun and the blood, hide, head, guts and feet removed, about 45% of the animal's weight. It is then chilled after meat inspection of the carcass and entrails for disease and parasites. The carcass after chilling is then carted back 100 km to a butcher shop in a registered- for- meat carrying vehicle. The carcass then ages for a week or so and is then broken down into primal cuts. About 15% is bone, which is discarded along with fat and selvage trim. If you wish to vend the meat yourself you must collect and store the meat in an approved vehicle and chilling facility and follow stringent foodsafe procedures to the letter.
    The laws are as Callum states for our health protection, hydatid tapeworms, trichinosis and other nasties lurk for the unsuspecting and uneducated. I kill my own meat on a rural property and have done for over 35 years, but have made especially sure that I am aware of meat safety specific issues all along and follow all my off farm processed beasts through the works when they get processed 3-5 times a year to produce a better product and to keep abreast of meat safety issues. There are also many on farm management procedures as well, such as burying offal, worming dogs and feeding them well cooked meat instead of raw meats, never letting them lick your face or hands, washing hands after petting animals, clean up dog faeces daily or have an off chain dunging area fenced off, having animal faeces worm egg tested by a veterinarian annually to see what is present and to mainly see how the drenches are working, burying carcasses immediately after vet post mortems to get a cause of death, quarantining new arrivals to see if they develop symptoms after arrival and to treat them before adding to the general population to mention just a few.
    Hydatid tapeworms can kill you at certain stages if they lodge in the brain and some other tissues. It doesn't occur in Aust. very often but it does happen.
    When I shoot wild pigs here I regularly find evidence of nasties that a meat inspector would condemn the carcass for, we never eat it here or feed it to our dogs.
    Callum EHO is dead right.
     
  6. dynnyrne

    dynnyrne New Member

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    That's a really interesting question meatshare!

    We likely wont produce more meat than we need but we could have this issue with raw milk and I find it mindnumbingly annoying that we can't share with willing families.

    I was curious about all that you wrote about inspections Curramore... if you have the animal killed and butchered on site then it would still be inspected right?
     
  7. Curramore1

    Curramore1 Junior Member

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    No, there are no compulsory on farm inspections of home killed beef here. The beast, when I slaughter it I inspect all the internal organs, especially the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, lymph glands, pancreas, stomachs for lesions, flukes etc., and also I have been tested and vaccinated for Q-Fever and as a child, Tuberculosis. Our weaned cattle are also vaccinated for several clostridial diseases and Tick Fever along with Leptospirosis hardjo and pomona. as calves and annually for the Clostridial diseases and Leptospirosis. This costs approx. $6.00 per head overall per year. We test for worm eggs a couple of times a year and treat when an economical threshold of eggs are counted in the samples. In the raw milk department I have been drinking it my whole life, but beware, we have had lab proven cases of Listeriosis in our beef cattle, which if transmitted in raw milk to a pregnant human can have disastrous results. When we were pregnant with our children we bought pasteurised milk so as to lower the risks. With the uplift in the price of store stock to around A$3.00 per kg live weight and meat prices received from the meat works from between A$4.50 to A$4.90 per kg. all of our beef has gone there this year except for what we kill for ourselves at home. You can share it with others as long as you discuss and accept the associated risk factors both with health and with your legal liabilities. Our sons drank raw milk from our house cows throughout their childhood and ate home-killed and cured and feral, hunted animals as well and both grew healthily to well over 200 cm or 6 foot 9 inches in old measure.
     

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