Feasibility study supports Small Farmers WA’s recent land purchase for new abattoir

A farmer-led advocacy group has secured a site for its highly anticipated service-kill livestock processing facility.

Small Farmers WA is the new owner of a 129.69ha site, located 8km south of Mount Barker in the Yerriminup Strategic Industrial Area.

Chief executive Patrick O’Neill said the feasibility study for the project was almost complete and “showed promise” which allowed the group to secure the Lot 1511 Albany Highway location.

“It’s not all doom and gloom, and why would you bother kind of pursuing the idea?” he said.

“I think there’s good reason now, which is demonstrated in that study, which is giving us the motivation to keep going. . . and also to enter contracts where you suddenly take on fairly considerable risk.”

The idea was established in response to the withdrawal of service-kill access by abattoirs and the growing lack of confidence among independent producers in the reliability of third-party processing facilities.

Mr O’Neill said the mission of the business was to provide equitable, permanent and viable access to multi-species processing within WA.

The Tingle Ridge Farm owner said as a farmer himself at the small end of the scale, it was his passion to provide the service to others like him.

“And also recognising that while there are people with developed businesses out there that might be doing 50 cattle a week. . . you can’t start at that level,” he said.

“A business needs to grow from a seed to get to that 50 cattle a week kind of level.

“That opportunity is consistently being kind of eroded in WA, and more broadly Australia, in that abattoirs don’t want to provide serviceable access and they particularly don’t want to provide it to small consignment numbers because it’s awkward and it’s logistically painful and so on.”

Mr O’Neill said there would be a protracted process of planning and approval before the project could break ground.

“We’ve probably got our biggest challenge coming up for the next six months, which is this capital raise thing,” he said.

“Government support, I think, is going to be critical.

“That will be an important part of the equation in terms of motivating or being a catalyst for private investment to bring us up to the amount that we’re going to need to execute the plan.”

Potential investors can register their interest on the Small Farmers WA website.