Some 250 Swiss farms slaughter their own livestock

Around 250 Swiss farms practice on-farm slaughtering Keystone-SDA

Around 250 farms in Switzerland prefer to kill their livestock on the farm rather than taking them to the abattoir. Farmers prefer this method, which they consider less stressful for the animals despite its complexity.

Since 2020, on-farm or on-pasture slaughtering has been authorised in Switzerland, and this has led to the development of a niche market. The Research Institute for Organic Agriculture (FiBL), based in Frick (AG), estimates that 250 farms kill their livestock on the farm.

On-farm slaughtering has seen the emergence of various service providers in recent years. These people take care, for example, of stunning, bleeding and transporting the animal’s carcass to the abattoir.

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Familiar surroundings

On the day of slaughter, the cattle are taken to a feed fence, a device installed in front of a trough to restrict their movements when eating. Once immobilised, the animal is stunned with a captive bolt gun. The pigs receive an electric shock.

Then everything has to happen very quickly. Beef is bled in a minute, and pork in even less time. The carcass is then taken to a slaughterhouse for processing.

To practise on-farm slaughtering, farms must obtain authorisation from the canton and carry out upstream work. They must find a butcher and a slaughterhouse where the animal can be taken. The maximum time between stunning and evisceration of the animal in a slaughterhouse is 90 minutes.

Direct sale

The number of animals killed on the farm is not increasing rapidly, because the meat is sold almost exclusively through direct marketing, the Organic Farming Research Institute explained to Keystone-SDA.

Traditional distribution channels such as retailers, restaurants or companies that would buy or offer this type of meat are virtually non-existent at present. Nor are there any marketing labels.

Consumers who buy directly from the farm are people who are sensitive to animal welfare and who are prepared to pay a higher price for quality meat.

Translated from French by DeepL/ds

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