Fifteen years from when RNZ’s Country Life first met the Andrews family, young son Luke has gone on to realise his childhood dream of becoming a butcher.
From helping his parents, Tom and Carrie, sell meat at the local farmers’ market,he’s become a fully qualified butcher working from their brick and mortar butchery in the heart of Cambridge, Wholly Cow.
“I’m pretty proud of where we’ve come from,” Luke said.
The philosophy at Wholly Cow is good traditional butchery using all parts of the animal - including liver, heart and kidneys.
“We’re a whole animal butchery that focuses on whole carcass butchery, so traditional.”
Luke said consumer trends were always changing, with a recent shift back to some of those overlooked cuts as people look to increase their iron intake.
What stays the same is ensuring high-quality products for their customers.
“All the beef and lamb we finish on our farm, 20 minutes out of Cambridge, and we’ve got a micro-abattoir on there where we kill it all ourselves, and then we process it ourselves, and then we sell it to the public.
“The whole paddock to plate works well.”
Finishing and processing the animals themselves made for better-tasting meats, he said, as reducing transport reduced stress on the stock.
The farm also operates using regenerative agriculture practices, including an on-farm compost heap that makes the most of the family’s access to a ready supply of blood and bone.
“People have now been starting to talk about this regenerative way, and it’s probably something that we’ve already been doing for most of the time,” Tom said.
“I’m starting to call myself a regenerative farmer.”
It involves lightly running the stock and making sure the paddocks have time to recover.
Running the farm also helps the family control the supply of livestock through to the butchery.
Image 1 of 7: The butchery focusses on good traditional techniques but consumer trends are always changing. Photo / Gianina Schwanecke, Country Life
“We work on about 1000 beef and about 2500 to 3000 lambs,” Tom said.
Back in the main house, Carrie also makes the most of every animal they process.
She collects the tallow (fat that sits around the kidney of the cattle) to render and turn into herbal-infused balms that make for great moisturisers.
“We’ve been here 18 years, and pretty much started selling meat one year after we got here, and it’s just been a long, slow-grow business where we’ve sort of, each year, slowly taken on something new.
More recently, she’s started processing the sheepskins too, turning them into beautiful leathers through an on-farm tannery, which she sells under the brand Flock.
“I just really want people to sort of engage with the greater of what we do ... and to realise that it’s from the farm, and it’s not some big mass-produced unit.”
