Animal Welfare: What’s at Steak
By Jayne Newgreen
If animal welfare is important to you, can you really trust labels such as organic, biodynamic, or grass-fed beef? What’s the REAL story behind the animal’s welfare?
Industrial Meat
The majority of beef you find on supermarket shelves is processed via industrial production methods, which involves intensive feedlots and transportation where cattle are transported over long distances, often cramped and stressed.
At a feedlot, cattle are fed a high-protein, grain-based diet to rapidly increase their weight before sale because they are sold by the kilogram, not the quality of meat.
Unfortunately, 70-80% of the beef produced for Coles and Woolworths involves cattle spending time in a feedlot.
Obviously, industrial production methods favours market demand, not the welfare and wellbeing of the animal.
You may like to choose beef that is organic, biodynamic, or grass-fed beef, but these labels only describe how the animals are raised on the farm, and leave out a very significant part of the picture – how those animals are treated in their final days, the bit between their paddock and your plate.
Until recently all animals would be live transported to a static abattoir. This involves loading cattle into a truck, exposing the animals to the stress of unfamiliar environments, handlers, and other animals, potential temperature stressors and hours or days without feed or water.
Only Provenir beef eliminates the stress associated with live animal transport with our Australian first, mobile on farm abattoir. So instead of the animals being transported to an abattoir, our mobile unit goes to the farm.
Unfortunately, when shopping you have no way of knowing which farm, and which abattoir your meat has come from because once the beef is packaged for sale, the origin isn’t shared.
So how do you make more informed decisions about animal welfare, quality and sustainability?
Why Your Food Choices Matter
In Australia, a growing number of producers like Provenir, believe in animal welfare, provenance and the health, quality and taste of the beef you buy.
Today, Provenir is Australia’s only 6-Star beef producer.
This is because Provenir believes the best quality meat comes from livestock that are raised and processed to the highest welfare standards.
Plus, at the heart of Provenir’s operation is an Australian first – a mobile on-farm processing unit that enables Provenir to eliminate live animal transport.
Provenir also enables a connection between you and the farmer, via a unique QR code on each meat pack, that tells you the entire paddock to plate story behind each cut of meat.
So if you do care about animal welfare, and of course great tasting, high quality meat, visit the Provenir Shop now and find out for yourself why people are trusting Provenir.
You can also keep up to date with Provenir news by signing up to the Provenir newsletter.
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Where to buy
You can have Provenir home delivered, purchase in-store, or experience it first hand at select restaurants.
Home delivered
Order online and receive Provenir beef delivered to your door.
Retail outlets
Find Provenir beef in grocery stores and butchers.
Restaurants
Experience Provenir beef cooked to perfection.