Victorian Chefs and Farmers Are Cheering This New Law – What About the Rest of the Country?

Victorian livestock farmer and agroecologist Dr Tammi Jonas remembers the exact moment the phone call arrived. It was the call she’d been waiting nearly a decade for – one that could potentially change small-scale livestock farming in her state forever. “I was ecstatic,” she says. “I couldn’t believe we actually won it. I still can’t.”

Since 2017, Jonas, along with the Agroecology & Food Sovereignty Alliance and other organisations, had been petitioning the Victorian government to allow independent livestock farmers to build self-managed abattoirs on their own properties – without the lengthy negotiations and lagging timeframes of the planning permission process. 

Finally, with this one call from Victoria’s Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture in July last year, the day had come: a farmer could now, in theory, fit out a 40-foot shipping container for purpose and start processing smaller animals such as goats or sheep (cattle require hardier infrastructure) on-site within three to six months. Food safety, slaughter and handling laws would still be strictly enforced.

When Jonas got the news, she started ringing other farmers – particularly those who were part of The Meat Collective at Jonai, who now hope to build a shared micro-abattoir for their own use. “Everybody was like, ‘you're kidding. Wow. We did it’.”

On the surface, a story about a change to planning permits sounds about as dry as a well-done steak. But it’s actually a huge win – not just for Victorian farmers, but for anyone who wants to eat more ethically raised and slaughtered meat. 

Small abattoirs have been closing around the country due to a number of factors, which has led to the consolidation of big, often multinational, firms. In recent years, those firms have increasingly stopped accepting “service kills” – the slaughter of small lots of animals raised on independent farms, which are then returned to the farmer for sale at butchers, markets and direct to consumers. 

As a result, access to local abattoirs has reached a crisis point for many farmers, whose livestock now need to travel greater distances for processing. The result is unnecessary stress on the animals and the environment – but it also ramps up the logistics cost for producers. 

In November 2024, cattle farmers Jessica Wood and James Miller from Zintara Farm in Trawool, 100 kilometres north of Melbourne, had just begun offering a subscription meat service to 70 households in their area. In December, their nearest abattoir announced it would no longer take their animals. “We were just one month in and we’d had people sign up for six months or a year, so we were like, ‘what on earth are we going to do?’” says Wood. 

The couple found another abattoir a full two hours’ drive away, knowing there was a possibility this one could suddenly turn them away, too. “Of all the processes that we go through to get meat from the farm to an eater, the abattoir situation is the most vulnerable point for us,” says Wood. “Once you can’t process locally, you lose all your smallholders, your local food producers,” adds Jonas.

Around Victoria, restaurants as well as farmers are steadily, cautiously beginning to take stock of what this legislation change really means. 

At Barragunda Dining on the Mornington Peninsula, farmer and chef Simone Watts is already making plans with other farmers in the area to build a shared abattoir and boning room. “It’s all systems go,” she says. “We’ve got the location, we just need boots on the ground to make it happen.” 

Watts is currently fielding expressions of interest from local butchers and sorting out capital grants to get it underway for the first year. “After that it should be able to stand on its own two feet.”

Watts isn’t alone. All over the country, chefs like her are eager to work more closely with small livestock farmers to give diners greater access to small-scale meat. Another advantage is offal, which large abattoirs rarely process for independent farmers due to the cost and labour involved. Jessica Wood says a small farmer might be able to buy back a tongue or a cheek for a premium – but they can never be sure it’s from their own animals. 

“We’d love to see more secondary cuts and offal and know where the meat is coming from,” says Matteo Galatto, owner of Lucio’s Marina in Noosa in Queensland.

“We spend so much time sourcing the best beef or lamb primary cuts, making sure animals are raised in specific ways, but when it comes to livers, hearts, tongue or kidneys it’s almost impossible to know.” 

Diana Deseni, head chef at Melbourne’s Daphne, would also love the chance to interact more directly with small livestock producers, the way she does with a lettuce farmer or a citrus grower, in order to know she’s getting the best quality meat. “Small farmers know their craft better than anyone,” she says. “They’ve put the hard work into farming, so we know they’re going to treat their animals right from start to finish.”

Victoria might be on the right track, but the rest of the country still has work to do. Currently, every state has different laws governing small-scale abattoirs, each of which needs to be reassessed before it’s too late. The alternative is a landscape in which farms of an equivalent size can’t survive.  

"If you want to eat the sort of meat that we all want to eat, this is the stuff you have to be paying attention to," says Grant Hilliard from ethical Sydney butcher Feather and Bone. 

A passionate advocate for sustainable food systems, Hilliard says a review is currently underway and governments simply have to take any findings seriously. “From my point of view – if you’ll excuse the pun – it’s a life and death situation,” he says. “I think we’re at a tipping point. But there is a lot of momentum for change.”