Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Poultry and Pets => The Hen House => Topic started by: Lazy Layers on May 19, 2021, 19:54
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I know that if you have 50 or more birds you need to be DEFRA registered but I am curious to know if there is/are any type of licensing required if I am selling them as meat?
I have 15 Quail and 25 Chickens (some of which are table birds - i.e. Dorking). I often eat Quail and watch my breeding to keep gene pools as fresh as possible and buy in new bloodlines every other year or two but it got me thinking about the chickens (which I hope to try for the first time this year) and if I were to have Quail and Chicken butchered ready for sale can I do this as per chicken sales, local domestic etc without licensing, food standards or if there is someone that would want oversight of my activities to ensure welfare standards, health hygiene standards etc etc?
Also does anyone know if I can get chickens slaughtered and packaged by commercial/approved slaughterhouses on a small scale and roughly what the cost would be?
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Hi and welcome to the forum.
You may not need DEFRA licensing for what you are proposing, but you will need to speak to your local authority about this. They will want to inspect any premises involved with food production. If you want to sell preserves or baked goods from home, they come and check you out. There will no doubt be additional checks they will want to make on animals being raised to sell as meat and if you want to sell from home.
As regards slaughtering, this has to done at licensed premises and you would probably get the best advice from meat stall owners at farmers markets. It would be worth contacting the organisers of any markets local to you to see if they have any contacts.
Most people raise meat birds for their own consumption just to make use of surplus males or because they want to know where their meat comes from. I think making money out of it is very difficult.
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Your local butcher might be a slaughterhouse