The Castricum brothers’ abattoir is one of the most professional, efficient and technically advanced in Australia, and employs over 300 people. Lambs are processed swiftly, with minimum stress placed on the animals before their slaughter. A Halal butcher, denoted by his yellow trousers in among otherwise white-uniformed staff, kills lambs while facing Mecca. This is a requirement of Muslim customers and opens up the sale of Castricum Lamb within Muslim communities in Australia and internationally.
The abattoir processes 3000–4000 animals a day. It takes about 25 minutes to process each animal from live weight to dressed weight (from the holding pen to the chilling room).
The lambs are strung up by their feet and carried along a conveyor belt. Their skins are removed in a swift motion and their innards discarded. All lambs that go through the plant are screened, photographed and weighed by a sophisticated digital scanning device that is able to measure each animal’s meat-to-fat ratio. This allows the Castricums to reward farmers for the amount of meat on the carcasses, rather than for the carcass weight alone. Leaner animals achieve a higher meat yield and are more prized as a result. This is one of the secrets of the success of Castricum lamb: the consistency of the product is guaranteed via such high-tech methods of processing.
Each carcass is colour-tagged according to its weight, and animals intended for international markets receive a separate label offering further information on the lamb’s origin and destination. These tags also enable the Castricum brothers to trace the animals right back to their original farm. The carcasses are moved – thousands every day – to a chilling room, where they spend the night being refrigerated into rigid (therefore workable) form. It is just prior to refrigeration that any lamb requiring ‘tender stretching’ is singled out. Tender stretching is the process of hanging the carcass close to its natural standing position, with an even distribution of weight throughout the carcass. This creates exceptionally succulent meat. Not all carcasses are treated like this due to the space it takes up, but tender stretching of a lamb carcass will be carried out on request.
The last stop prior to transportation is the boning room. One hundred highly skilled butchers work on the production chain, slicing the carcasses into various cuts and joints. They work with breathtaking precision – finishing with a product that is vacuum-sealed and boxed, ready for consumption.