How mass production lines, the invention of refrigeration and food safety changed the way we eat meat

Community expectations about meat processing and animal welfare are changing, with growing concerns about transparency in abattoirs.

But killing animals for meat has been an integral part of Australian society and its economy for more than 100 years.

On the production line inside an abattoir, the animal is restrained, stunned and then bled. In just a few seconds it goes from a living beast to a carcass.

The killing of animals can be a gruesome and confronting sight — the inevitable but largely unseen part of Australia's meat-eating society.

It happens on an industrial scale. The meat packing lines pioneered in the 1860s in the United States became the inspiration for Henry Ford's assembly lines to build cars.

Australia is no different. Industrial-scale abattoirs have dominated the sector and over the past few decades smaller abattoirs have been on the decline.

The ability to provide the masses with affordable and tasty meat, something we now take for granted, was developed more than 100 years ago using a highly centralised system, production lines and refrigeration.

Commonwealth's largest abattoir

In Australia, massive abattoirs were built by governments in the early 1900s, after the grim and unhygienic conditions inside meat-packing facilities were exposed by American journalist Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle.

In 1906 he wrote:

There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it.

State governments and councils decided they needed to take control of processing in order to provide safe meat to growing metropolitan populations, and built facilities in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and Sydney.

In 1906, legislation was passed in New South Wales to build the Homebush abattoir, a facility that would become the largest of its kind in the Commonwealth.

From 1916 to 1988, millions of animals were slaughtered at Homebush each year. At its peak, 3,000 men were employed, processing 20,000 sheep, 1,500 cattle, 2,000 pigs and 1,300 calves per day.

When it closed in 1988, Ray Simersall, president of the Homebush Abattoir Retention Committee, told the ABC that for those who worked there it was a way of life.

"I think it's a shame because the other guys have been going more than 70 years, and they've had blokes here over the years whose sons have come here, their sons have come here. It's like an institution."

A vision for export

At the same time that governments were building large-scale abattoirs to supply the domestic markets, entrepreneurs were investing in private abattoirs looking to export.

But meat industry historian Steve Martyn said that could only happen after refrigeration was invented.

"That gave a vision to many that the opportunity to export Australia's significant meat production was possible to overseas countries, especially to the United Kingdom.

"As the marine industry started to realise the potential of the technology, they started building ships that were specialised to carry frozen meat and chilled meat."

According to Mr Martyn, it was the vision of a man called William Angliss that took Australia's frozen meat to the world; a vision that had a profound impact on the fledgling nation.

Mr Angliss started a butcher's shop as an 18-year-old immigrant and when he died in 1957, he was reputedly Australia's wealthiest citizen.

"He obviously had a vision as to the opportunities that existed with export markets and he went to the United States to view some of the facilities that were operating there, especially in Chicago, and the chain processing systems that were in place," Mr Martyn said.

"He came back and implemented that in Footscray and became a very successful operator and probably one of Australia's greatest exporters of the first few decades of the last century."

'Un-Australian'

As meat became a staple in Australians' diets, and the export industry increased farm production, abattoirs provided jobs to thousands of people in both big cities and rural areas.

In the 1950s, decentralisation took place and local councils took on the job of building and managing abattoirs.

This meant that the killing process moved away from areas heavily populated with people to where the animals were.

"You could see immediately these processing facilities became a very important part of the local community but also gave producers a significant opportunity to grow their herds and flocks and be able to supply both the domestic market and increasing access into the international market," Mr Martyn said.

It's against that backdrop of history and culture that animal activists, calling for an end to the killing of animals for meat, have in recent times been labelled "un-Australian", including by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Roger Fletcher started in the industry as a drover. More than 40 years later he owns one of the country's biggest sheep meat processors, with plants in Dubbo and Albany.

"Unfortunately, councils can't run business and they all went out the back door," he said.

"Most of the sheep processing businesses today are family-run operations and probably some of them came out of the ashes of council and government-run abattoirs."

From the production lines to improvements in welfare, Mr Fletcher said today's abattoirs were vastly different from when he started in the industry.

But it's getting harder and harder to let people inside.

"One of the problems we've got now is with our insurances and people have made it so difficult. This is the minority groups putting pressure on all the time," Mr Fletcher said.

Unseen slaughter

As a nation, Australians are now the highest per-capita consumers of meat in the world.

Most people buy their meat at the supermarket, neatly packed into affordable, meal-sized products that hide the reality of where they've come from.

Society is now so removed from the process of slaughter that many are aghast when the realities are presented.

There is a loud and growing movement of animal rights activists bringing more attention to the issue of farming and processing of animals.

While most people aren't locking themselves up to abattoirs with them and are happy to continue eating animals, the majority of Australians are concerned about the treatment of animals.

Recent research commissioned by the Federal Department of Agriculture found 95 per cent of people viewed farm animal welfare to be a concern.

And more than 40 per cent of people were concerned about poor animal welfare in abattoirs.

Glass abattoirs

Central Victorian pig and beef farmer Tammi Jonas represents the growing number of small-scale producers across Australia.

She wants farmers to have more control over the death of their animals and for abattoirs to be more open and transparent.

"I kind of like the idea of the statement, 'If abattoirs had glass walls nobody would eat animals'. I actually think it's the opposite.

Small-scale farmers across the country are struggling to find abattoirs to process their meat and are being told it's not worth it economically.

"The problem is centralised control of all processing infrastructure and abattoirs are just one example of that," Ms Jonas explained.

"So as bigger companies buy bigger abattoirs, the small ones are put out of business, basically because they can't compete, they can't keep meeting higher compliance requirements and the large-scale abattoirs don't want to service small-scale farmers.

"You know if you've got a truck and it's bringing a thousand animals in versus one that's bringing seven, who are you going to choose to process for?

"So we're hard for them to work with."

Killing on farm

Nationally, small-scale poultry producers have been the hardest hit and in Victoria there is only one abattoir left that will process small batches.

That has prompted central Victorian poultry farmer Ben Falloon to build his own micro-abattoir on his property, Taranaki Farm.

"There's been increased demand in customers seeking ethically produced produce, that's really exploded over the last 10 years. But nothing's happened in the processing field," he said.

Mr Falloon has taken on the idea of an open and transparent abattoir by building his with glass walls.

For farmers like Ben Falloon, it's about more than selling a product; it's also about ethics and building a social movement.

"We are … trying to be a credible alternative to factory farming, so that means we've got to be able to produce the food, we have to be able to do it efficiently and most importantly we want to do it transparently."

Breaking the wheel

Tammi Jonas is hoping for a farming revolution.

"The industrial system needs to break so that it can be reformed," she said.

"We've already seen massive welfare improvement in the industrial abattoirs but I also want to see economic models that don't break farmers."

But if affordable meat is to remain a staple of Australian diets, the mass production and slaughter of animals is unlikely to change.

"We as an industry are supplying from the people who are on the lowest wage to people who are on the highest wage," said Patrick Hutchinson, CEO of the Australian Meat Industry Council.

"While I can empathise that there are people who want to differentiate themselves from the industrialised process, there are tens of thousands of, hundreds of thousands, millions of consumers that want to consume protein."