The Last Ones Standing: Why Small Abattoirs Matter
Earlier this autumn, I stepped away from my desk to visit Mike, one of our beef farmers, whose farm is home to one of the last small abattoirs left in Somerset.
Mike told me there used to be fifteen abattoirs in his local area. Now there’s just him. That isn’t a Somerset quirk. In the 1970s the UK had around 2,500 abattoirs. Today it’s closer to 200. Nine in ten have gone within a single farming lifetime.
He proudly showed me his artisanal approach to ‘dressing’ beef carcasses by hand and knife, rather than with the automated machinery and ‘speed boners’ you’ll find in the big abattoirs. As we walked past locally reared, traditional-breed cattle, sheep and pigs, two things were obvious. This approach costs more money. It also produces exceptional meat.
Take the vet. Mike has to have one on site, and it costs him £8,000 a week. That bill is easy to absorb if you’re a large abattoir processing 2,500 cattle a week. It’s a very different matter when you’re doing 300, like him.
Why should you care about small abattoirs?
Because of the animals. On this farm, cattle are walked from the field into the abattoir. There are no vans, crates, ferries or industrial set-ups, and none of the welfare problems that come with them.
In a survey of 850 farmers and land managers, two-thirds said they’d struggled to get access to a suitable abattoir. Small abattoirs do something the big ones generally can’t. They kill an individual farmer’s animals and hand back that farmer’s own carcass. That’s what lets a farmer sell their own meat, and lets you know exactly which farm it came from.
Why local abattoirs need support now
Every Field & Flower rib of beef ageing for Christmas Day has to pass through somewhere like the place I visited. And there are fewer of those places every year.
In October an unusually broad coalition, including the NFU, the Soil Association and the Sustainable Food Trust, write to the Prime Minister asking for local slaughter capacity to be treated as essential food infrastructure. Their argument is simple: you can’t have British meat without somewhere British to process it. We couldn’t agree more.
Every time you buy meat that passed through a small, local abattoir, you’re helping keep its lights on. This Christmas, that’s worth thinking about.
Small abattoirs: your questions answered
How many abattoirs are left in the UK?
About 200. The British Meat Processors Association puts the figure at 203, down from around 2,500 in the 1970s. That means roughly nine in ten have closed in a single farming lifetime.
Why are small abattoirs closing?
Mostly because the costs don’t scale down. Every abattoir needs an official vet on site and has to meet the same inspection rules, whether it handles 300 animals a week or 2,500. Meanwhile, eight businesses now account for around 70% of UK meat processing turnover, so small sites are competing with very large ones.
Are small abattoirs better for animal welfare?
Shorter journeys mean less stress. Where there’s no local abattoir, animals can travel for hours: between 2021 and 2023, more than half of Scottish-reared sheep were trucked to England or Wales for slaughter, some on journeys of up to 24 hours. At a small abattoir, animals are often handled individually by people who know them.
What does “getting your own carcass back” mean?
Small abattoirs can process one farmer’s animals and return that exact carcass to them. That’s what makes it possible to sell meat directly and trace it to a single farm. In the 2025 survey, 43% of farmers said they could no longer sell meat locally if their abattoir closed.
How can I support small abattoirs?
Buy meat from farmers and butchers who use them, and ask where your meat was processed. Every Field & Flower farmer works to our Farming Promise, which puts welfare and traceability first.
