Help us build the Jonai Meatsmith Collective abattoir!

We started talking about the need for small-scale regional abattoirs shortly after we started farming pigs and cattle in 2011, but building a boning room was the immediate priority as we struggled to find regular butchery from the beginning. After commissioning the boning room in January 2014 and the commercial kitchen in July 2015, we forsook industrial grain supplies for the pigs’ feed, shifting entirely to waste stream by the end of 2016. Each of these moves steadily reduced our reliance on commodity supply chains, bringing control of our resource base onto the farm one link at a time.

Our last tie to industrial food systems (aside from diverting their so-called waste from landfill and into the tummies of hungry piggehs) is slaughter. While there are no obvious financial savings to us in building a small facility that can’t lean on economies of scale, the value to us in improved welfare for the animals on their last day is priceless. And of course, like smallholders around the world, we recognize the risk to our entire system should we lose access to the large-scale abattoirs we currently use. This risk is made all the greater by extreme centralisation, which recently got worse with the acquisition of our pig abattoir by the world’s biggest meatpacker JBS, who incidentally were the most affected in the meat industry globally by covid shutdowns.

After years of research on small-scale on-farm and regional abattoirs in the US and Australia, we have settled on a vision to build a micro-abattoir here at Jonai Farms. But unlike building a boning room or kitchen in a quick six-month conversion of a 40-foot refrigerated container, an abattoir is a much bigger undertaking, physically, legislatively, and financially.

We currently butcher with and for seven other farms, and there are several more interested in collaborating if we build an abattoir and bigger boning room and chiller capacity. The existing boning room and commercial kitchen facilities have served us well for the past eight years, but we are at capacity in terms of providing services for others. We are therefore building a new boning room, kitchen and farm gate shop alongside the abattoir to accommodate up to a cap of about 15 farms’ needs.

We are engaged in deeper relationships of reciprocity and mutual aid with these and other farms in collectively solving problems, deepening our knowledge of agroecology, sourcing feed, and sharing occasional labour. The other farmers’ access to our facilities is provided at cost – provision of processing facilities is not how we earn our livelihood, it’s how we ensure more farmers can earn a right livelihood themselves.

We envision the Jonai Meatsmith Collective will be owned and operated by Jonai Farms, but will function as ‘community-supported slaughter’ (CSS) in a similar way to community-supported agriculture (CSA). And like the boning room hire, slaughter will be offered at cost. Farms will sign up as members of the Collective and pay a percentage of their anticipated slaughter fees for the year ahead up front to secure a year of monthly slaughter. While Jonai Farms will employ staff who will coordinate scheduling and manage logistics and communications with members, there will be opportunities for farmers to collectively discuss their needs and negotiate schedules that will accommodate all members fairly and efficiently.

Each year, members will be invited to attend an Annual General Meeting (AGM), where a Profit & Loss (P&L) and Budget will be presented, enabling everyone to democratically set pricing for slaughter to ensure: a viable and resilient meat processing facility, the highest standards of animal welfare, financially sustainable slaughter for members, and fair wages for all staff.

Funding is a critical piece of the puzzle – just as we eschew external inputs at our farm, we are committed to avoiding debt to build infrastructure. Debt avoidance is pivotal to degrowth thinking and doing. The interest we would have to repay – profits to the bank’s shareholders – would seriously undermine our capacity to build and operate a viable abattoir. In addition to our savings, a creative combination of offering some enticing rewards such as Tammi’s upcoming cookbook (!), Speckleline hides, and in person fundraising, with the possibility of some grant money, will be used to raise the funds we need to build the facility, and as you’ll read below, we’ll be accepting donations as well. We've also been supported by the excellent young agrarians, who raised 16 of our surplus pigs, and have butchered and sold the pork independently to kick off our fundraising. The business model will be self-sustaining, and reliant on its not-for-profit approach.

Our current budget estimates are coming in between $400k and $500k. There are a lot of unknowns in an owner-built facility that will be functional and durable, environmentally sustainable with very high animal welfare standards for lairage and stunning, and aesthetically pleasing for workers and visitors alike, using a combination of new and secondhand materials as appropriate to all of these values. There are no ‘out of the box’ solutions for context specific problems, no matter how much industrial society wants you to think there are.

For many years we have been working to build diversity and resilience on the farm – from biodiversity through to diverse skillsets amongst our team. With the abattoir addition, our aim is to enable all of us to be able to work across the system – farming, slaughtering, butchering, and delivering – as well as maintaining a regular spot on the lunch roster. As we’ll be processing for several other farms, there will be plenty of work to go around! Jonai Farms already functions as a farmer incubator, and adding an abattoir will mean the opportunity to teach whole value chain skills to grow a future generation of farmers and farm and food workers. Tammi and lead farmhand Adam are currently nearing completion of their meat inspector training – another piece of the puzzle solved.

The following is our proposed timeline, subject to all the caveats of things beyond our control, such as Council planning timelines, supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Stuart’s and other workers’ availability, other farm demands, funding, and the weather.

Timeline

Oct 2021- Jun 2022

Project planning phase

·      Development of vision and project plan

·      Abattoir design

·      Draft budget

·      Preparation of Development Application

·      Funding model development for capital expenses

·      Business modelling

Apr 2022

Commence fundraising

Jun 2022

Submit Development Application to Council

Nov-Dec 2022

Site preparation & start ordering equipment

Jan 2023

Commence construction

Oct 2023

Commission facility, including license with Primesafe

De-commission and sell existing facilities

As always at Jonai, we remain committed to radical transparency. As we progress this project, we will share our learnings with you for better or worse, and we will make all of our documentation freely available.

We have always shared what we learn, and we will continue to do so, but in the interest of raising the funds for the project, we have decided to accept donations from any who might like and be able to provide a bit of support for our efforts to radically transform the food system from the ground up. Unlike in capitalist society generally, the ability to pay will NOT provide privileged access to the knowledge we are sharing, but rather will ensure that it is shared with everyone.

Imagine if our communities all around Australia and the world pooled our resources in this way to reclaim control of the means of production, and the means of communication, energy, transport – the sky’s the limit!

Viva!

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On transparency...

In response to last week's spot on Radio National Bush Telegraph, we had a lot of negative reaction online from people who don't agree with eating meat. So a friend of mine and I wrote a response, which was posted on the RN site just before I went on air again to discuss the reaction and our decision to castrate in spite of a very close poll that voted against it. Unfortunately, RN edited out Nathan's part, which really is a shame because he's wickedly smart and reflexive, and also happens to be a vegan.

Here's the full text, unedited (you can see the RN version here):

Tammi:

Showing a vegan a photo of an adorable piglet and then asking them to help decide whether to castrate is undoubtedly a red flag to a bull. But it wasn’t vegans we were asking, it was omnivores. What some will call ill-considered (I did briefly), I will here defend as a serious exercise in transparency by farmers who want to educate the public about the realities of food production, and especially the raising of animals for meat. And my vegan friend Nathan and I will argue that vitriolic attacks on those of us committed to transparency create a perverse incentive to retreat to secrecy and obfuscation of regular food production management practices.

We’ve been farming free-range rare breed Large Black pigs for a year and a half now. We came from Melbourne with a clear vision to contribute to what we consider ethical farming - raising pigs on the paddocks who are free to root and wallow at will, and basically express what Joel Salatin calls ‘the pigness of the pig’ until they have ‘one bad day’, which they don’t even know is coming. We believe it’s morally right to eat meat, but not from animals who have suffered or been raised in close confinement their entire lives up until slaughter. Our views and farming practices are not especially controversial, and generally our efforts to raise animals for food humanely and with care and kindness are met with appreciation - both for our practices and for our openness.

So it seemed a great idea when Cameron Wilson of Radio National Bush Telegraph asked whether we were willing for them to do a series tracking one of our animals from piglet to Christmas ham. Too many people don’t know where their food comes from or how it’s raised, though the tide is hopefully turning as information is now more readily accessible and people are realising there’s a lot that happens from paddock to plate.

The idea is a monthly radio interview where we update listeners on what’s been happening with the pig, who we’ve called Wilbur 101 (we call all the boys Wilbur and all the girls Charlotte unless they’re our breeding stock, in which case they have individual names, such as Borg, Big Mama, Keen, Pink and Prudence…). Many people believe you shouldn’t name your food, but we take the view that we’d rather know the animal on our plate well than not at all.

Supplementary to each month’s interview, we agreed to allow a poll to be held to seek the public’s view on management decisions. It gives an opportunity to inform people of the multitude of issues and decisions farmers face daily, and we hoped that using a poll in addition to the podcast and information on the website would lead to more buy in from the public, and in turn more care about the type of system animals are raised in. The first question we posited (as it’s the first management decision we face with newborn boars) was whether or not to castrate.

Unfortunately, while the omnivorous public might have wanted to discuss the practicalities and ethics of castrating boars, a significant number of those opposed to eating meat joined the discussion and turned it into a rant against us, the ABC, farmers generally, and meat eaters specifically. We were called ‘sick freaks’, ‘Neanderthals’, and ‘animal abusers’, to name some of the milder insults.

Nathan:

There are a number of things worth considering here: namely, the ad hominem attacks, the issue of transparency, and the illusion that either veganism or vegetarianism are without their own set of complications, also linked to transparency.

The issue of ad hominem attacks, whether against Tammi and Stuart, the ABC, or meat eaters more generally, brings into question the motives of those willing to utter such comments as to what they are trying to achieve. Considered, respectful discussion is never going to be the effect, nor is any type of conversion from eating meat tenable if the basis of an antithetical argument is vitriolic abuse. Moreover, it lacks all credibility and illustrates a lack of knowledge and understanding not only of farming processes and practices, which is seemingly what this project is attempting to bring to light, but also appears to lack an understanding and knowledge of why people become vegans or vegetarians in the first place, or why people may 'de-convert' — a phenomenon equally present to the phenomenon of people becoming vegan or vegetarian.

All these considerations are not only deeply philosophical, but are also sociological, religious and political. If the conversion to veganism or vegtarianism is well considered, it would be charitable enough to expect that an argument against eating meat is equally considered; calling someone a 'sick freak' or 'Neanderthal' does not range in the category of a rationally considered argument.

Of course, the idea behind this project is transparency. While I as a vegan may disagree with the killing and exploitation of animals for various reasons, the kind of practices brought to light through this program are refreshing to see. In the wake of footage and articles that surround the practice of live export and animal abuse in abattoirs, the program undertaken here ought to be a welcome relief to vegans and vegetarians as we have farmers not only willing to transparently show how animals are treated, but also have public involvement. The outcome of transparency and public involvement is the basis of a descriptive set of guidelines and practices that can be adopted by all farmers. In effect, this program has the potential to become a national standard whereby consumers have the confidence to purchase animal products that have been treated in an ethical manner; whereby the ethical treatment of animals has been considered.

The issue of transparency and the ethical treatment of animals is also a problem for vegan and vegetarian foodways. The ethical treatment of animals is not just to be considered for the animals we can see, but also for the ones we don't.  What consideration is there of the countless rodents and small marsupials that are killed through the processes of producing a loaf of bread? Are the numerous animals killed in the process of pest control of wheat crops, the storage of wheat and flour worthy of our moral consideration? What about the fish whose parts are used in the mass production of beer? Or what of the environmental cost of the global shipping of processed vegan and vegetarian food items? Is the environment also worthy of moral consideration to vegans and vegetarians?

Often the mistreatment and exploitation of animals and the environment is a symptom of a much larger problem. With the spread of global capitalism, the need to feed the starving, unemployed, underemployed and low waged is met with with cheap meat, dairy and eggs at the expense of animal well being. How does veganism approach the problem of starvation, unemployment, underemployment and low wage employment with highly priced soy products? While veganism can betray the maltreatment of animals through analytic critique, the sense in which veganism is able to confront issues of starvation, low wage, under and unemployment betrays itself as being unable to satisfactorily confront environmental and everyday living conditions; veganism requires a level of wealth and prosperity that isn't afforded to the underprivileged. While it is important to analyse and critique the way animals are treated within the global economic market in which we live, it is equally important to engage with farmers and producers willing to be transparent about foodways and the way in which animals are treated in a respectful and considerate manner, as well as being aware of the issues of transparency within our own vegan and vegetarian foodways.

Tammi:

All issues and concerns around the ethics of food production and consumption are worthy of discussion and open scrutiny, but when one group restricts itself to shouting the loudest abuse, or refuses to engage even marginally with the topic at hand (and makes it very unpleasant for any who do engage), there can be no winners - especially not farm animals.

Surely we can all agree that a farming community unwilling to share its practices with the public due to sustained, personal attacks by so-called ‘animal rights activists’ is a very bad outcome. We here at Jonai Farms won’t be frightened away from the challenge of transparency - we understand why people choose veganism or vegetarianism (I was a vegetarian for seven years, and write frequently on my blog about these very questions), and we quite simply disagree with that decision while respecting one’s right to make it. Vegans have every right to disagree with our position, of course, but should think long and hard about what can happen to our food system when they so zealously shout farmers off the stage.

BIOS: Tammi Jonas is a free-range pig farmer with her husband Stuart and three children near Daylesford, Victoria. She is also a cultural theorist nearing completion of a PhD on the role of engagements with multicultural foodways on the development of a cosmopolitan, sustainable society. Tammi blogs atTammi Jonas: Food Ethics and on the farm blog, The Hedonist Life.

Nathan Everson is currently undertaking a Masters of Research degree through Macquarie University, Sydney, focusing on the structural intersections between humans and animals and how these intersections form the basis of our conceptions of politics, ethics, and law. He is a vegan working with his wife and two children on self-sustainable practices within a suburban environment.