From Barton to Abattoir
Part One: Cattle

Excerpts from an historical dairy farming year and an ending.

This project combines text with images and captions to tell its story sensitively.
Although some agricultural practices have altered since I followed an agricultural year
through in 1980, much of what you will see here hasn’t changed in essence.
I still believe that British farming sets a fine example to the rest of the world
with its high standards of land and livestock husbandry.

“Yes, I am still a meat eater,” I replied after being questioned about my reasons for doing this project. But there were moments, during the twice weekly visits I paid over three months of photography at the Exeter City Abattoir, when I could have been put off. However, farming is an industry and meat production is a part of that, so I was determined to see it through.

Most cattle, pigs and sheep end their lives in an abattoir. I realised this after following a three hundred acre-plus dairy farm, known in Devon as a barton, through its seasonal year. To finish the project, I obtained permission from the Fatstock Marketing Corporation to document the work of their abattoir. Any member of the public who was licensed to do so could slaughter animals there by prior arrangement, including Halal or Kosher butchers.

The FMC employed a team of slaughtermen and dressers who together worked a fast moving production line. This went from stunning and killing to performing the first stage of butchering by skinning, gutting and cleaning the carcasses. All of the men had to serve a four year apprenticeship and were professional, taking a pride in their work. “We get labelled as being cruel to animals because we work here,” one man told me, “but that’s upsetting. I have family pets and I love my dog just like anyone else.” I believed him and saw no intentional cruelty throughout my time there, although the Moslem requirement that animals should be alive during bleeding - having their throats cut - was hard to witness. The FMC slaughterman who had to lightly stun sheep before the ritual killing told me, “It gets on my wick.” It did mine, too.

I had no direct experience of farming when I started, but at the barton I was encouraged to learn. By contrast, my first few visits to the abattoir felt like baptisms of fire. I accompanied Public Health Inspectors on their rounds at first, but some shop-floor workers were understandably suspicious of a photographer’s motives. I could have been an animal rights activist seeking incriminating evidence of cruelty, or a photojournalist looking for a controversial story to sell to the press. I wasn’t. I was simply bringing my farming year project to its logical conclusion and the FMC management welcomed my interest. However, I was a woman intruding on an all male world and that certainly was a difficulty. No-one expected me to last more than a day or two without fainting or throwing up, like other ladies had done. When I kept on coming, some of the men did try to get rid of me. I was ‘accidentally’ drenched in blood or guts or whatever was to hand. “My poor camera,” I would say, wiping the muck from the lens but ignoring whatever else was plastering me. A sense of humour helped.

I used to catch a bus home. I would sit on a seat near the door because I was splattered with congealed blood and stank so much. Other passengers stared at me but I ignored the looks and muffled comments. No-one ever asked me if I was alright. No-one ever called the police in case I was a killer fleeing a bloody massacre.

Eventually, my resilience at the factory paid off. The abattoir workers came to trust me to show the outside world how tough their job was. The slaughtermen were stoical and the shop floor workers diligent. Theirs was a hard life and I respected them.

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How can we relate the raw reality of an abattoir to the outwardly romantic appearance of a dairy farm? Green pastures, cows chewing the ‘cud’ in an unspoilt landscape, a feeling of timelessness as the farming year goes around with Mother Nature at the helm. All are part of the popular view of ‘the countryside’. But with the demise of many small farms and the dominance of larger scale production, we ought now to accept that slaughtering is part of the farming industry and try to come to terms with it. However, neatly packaged supermarket portions continue to perpetuate a sense of unreality.“Can that really be a bit of animal?” I sometimes wonder after I have picked through a pile of packs to find the leanest and best value piece of meat. We need to connect our breakfast bacon or steak ’n chip tea to what led up to it and realise that taking a life for our nourishment does not come easy. Even if the cost of those supermarket packages is cheap.

The bulk of the barton’s acreage was used as pasture. Cows would graze and crop-grass cut to be used as silage. Some cereal or veg would also be grown for cash or animal fodder. Near the farmhouse was a milking parlour and a yard, with a silage clamp and barns used for storage or animal housing. This formed a compact nucleus around which the whole traditional mixed farm functioned. Today, businesses like this are still plentiful but more diverse. My house overlooks one.

Nowadays it pays to branch out with free-range chickens, goats or rare breed pigs, a shop or tourist accommodation. Own-brand milk or meat have become popular too. This all helps to supplement the dairy herd income and maintain the unique appearance of our English countryside.

Subsidies also help smaller farms to continue working traditionally but nowadays, food production is secondary to their role as custodians of the countryside. The EEC has encouraged this to protect our natural environment - although that could change with Brexit - and the tourist industry has certainly benefited.

Many farms are highly mechanised. Even medium sized mixed ones run on traditional lines, which I feature here. This requires a large initial outlay but labour costs are cut, work is done at a faster pace and tax relief can be claimed. In the long run, it is economical, but financial reward can often be low and hours long and lonely. Farming is definitely a job for people who like to work at their own pace and without supervision, but it’s sad to find so much of the landscape uninhabited.

Milking at the barton took place twice a day, at 7am and 3pm, but some farms now follow a different routine to cut down costs. Milking is done only in the morning at certain times of the year, while some of the herd is dried off and kept on subsistence diet. Factory farms are fully automated. The herd lives indoors while outdoors, the land is cropped to provide feed. Only machines move from field to field. Pasture is animal free. A vet will be on-hand rather than on-call.

As so much of our farmland seems destined to be sold off for housing, why should we worry about what happens in the English countryside, anyway? Meat and veg come in sanitary plastic packaging, free of blood or dirt, so why bother? But think. Do we really want to lose contact with our food production, entirely? I didn’t. So here are a few examples of what life on the barton was like.

Above: forage harvester cropping and manual milking parlour.
Below: breech birth and newly born calf.

*

After witnessing a full farming year I had a question for the farmer.

“What happens to cows after their working life is finished, or to bullocks?”

He shrugged. “They go off to market, or a buyer takes them.” Either way, they ended up being slaughtered. He had done his best to give them a good life, within the confines of running a business and trying to make a profit from his produce, but the ending was inevitable.

Abattoir

I had to see for myself what happened there. 

A penetrative captive bolt pistol is used to stun cattle.

It is powered by blank ammunition.

Prior to this: cattle are released from their enclosures at the lairage (a barn-like holding area) into a corridor leading to the stunning pen.

This is hidden behind a gate at its end.

After stunning, the cow or bullock is sprung out of the pen through a trap door, onto the floor. A rod is then passed through the channel made
by the bolt through its head, known as pithing, to destroy the nerve which could otherwise cause convulsions and make the body difficult to handle.

Finally, the carcass’s rear legs are shackled and it is hoisted up a vent to the butchering floor overhead.

There it will await retrieval until joining the production line.

Butchering. 

The objective for the abattoir is a marketable side of beef.

To produce this, the carcass must be stripped of all appendages, skin and innards.

Nothing is wasted.

The process begins with throat cutting, known as ‘sticking’, then removal of the head.

A gulley takes away blood for storage and future use in the fertiliser, ‘Blood, Fish and Bone’.

Heads are useful for the pouches of meat in their faces.

This is either sold as ‘cheek’ or used in pet food.

The headless carcass is taken down from its hangar onto the shop floor.

Laid on a cradle, its hooves are removed and underside sawn open,
ready for the removal of internal organs.

A skin hangs like a drape and stomach walls line a grotesque ‘cloakroom’, ready to make two useful
byproducts. Tanning will create leather. Scalding, cooking and bleaching will produce tripe.

Teams of dressers work on all stages of the production line simultaneously, until the whole
consignment of cattle is finished. Cleaning was done continuously. The floor was always wet.

This is where the carcass becomes meat.
A Public Health Inspector stamps his approval of a side of beef being fit for human consumption.

The cattle have come a long way since they awaited slaughter at the lairage.

This is the end of the line.
After being weighed and labelled, sides of beef are taken
from the main floor area to refrigerated storage.

This is what we and our pets eat.

As I said earlier, those neat little packages in the supermarket, or the double bagged, tissue covered
cuts from butchers’ counters, do seem quite remote from the reality of meat production.

In part two of my historical abattoir project, I describe how sheep and pigs became lamb and pork.
Then I will think again about becoming vegetarian. I didn’t, forty years ago. But I could have done.

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