> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Farm Hosting New Zealand's Soil Festival Kills Its Own Animals. Almost Nobody Does. - URL: https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/the-farm-hosting-new-zealands-soil-festival-kills-its-own-animals-almost-nobody-does/ - Published: 2026-09-20T18:31:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-20T18:31:35.000Z - Description: Underground Festival is moving to a Waikato farm that raises, kills, butchers and sells its own animals without any of it leaving the district. That chain is rarer than it sounds, and the gap it closes is the same gap that keeps the word organic off good meat. - Author: Luke Nicholas - Tags: beef, Regenerative farming, meat, Farming Festivals, Producer Profiles New Zealand has 22.78 million sheep and 3.96 million beef cattle, going by [Beef + Lamb's stock number survey](https://beeflambnz.com/news/survey-shows-continued-shift-towards-beef-cattle?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) for the year to 30 June 2026\. Nearly all of them will be killed in plants built for export. High volume, long distances, animals trucked to where the capacity is. It works if you are filling containers for Shanghai. It works badly if you are a farmer with forty lambs and a phone number. In March 2027, a few hundred people will spend two days on a farm that opted out of that arrangement. [Underground Festival](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/underground-festival-2027-new-zealands-soil-food-and-farming-festival-moves-to-the-waikato/) is leaving its North Canterbury vineyard for a 350-hectare sheep and beef property outside Cambridge belonging to Tom and Carrie Andrews. I've written up the dates and tickets separately. This is about who they are. Their business is [Wholly Cow](https://www.whollycow.co.nz/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz), a butchery on Cambridge's main street that their son Luke runs. It is not certified organic. It has never claimed to be. The homepage says "regenerative" and "sustainable" and stops there. ## A market stall, $25 a morning RNZ's Country Life first found them on [26 February 2010](https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/countrylife/audio/2223984/wholly-cow?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz), under a billing that has aged nicely: Tom Andrews sells meat from his own farm at farmers' markets. That was the whole business. They had bought the farm in 2007 and were doing what most sheep and beef farmers do, which is sell everything into the export chain and never see it again. Neither came from farming. Tom had been a roading contractor since leaving school at about fourteen. Carrie has a diploma in fine arts. A stall cost about $25 a morning. Cheap enough to find out whether anyone wanted what they were selling. Someone did. In 2016 they bought the Cambridge butchery. Then the thing happened that explains everything afterwards. They had been sending their animals to the abattoir at Ruakura, twenty minutes up the road. Ruakura was sold. Their finished stock suddenly had to go to Auckland, hours in a truck for animals they had spent two years growing carefully. So they built their own. ## Two years of paperwork, and then a kill room The micro-abattoir opened in February 2018, after what Carrie described to [Farm Trader](https://www.farmtrader.co.nz/wholly-cow-profile/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) as about two years of paperwork. It sits in the sheep yards. Animals arrive a day or two beforehand, walk through the same races they have been drafted in all their lives, and are killed one at a time, roughly thirty-five minutes each, with a full washdown between every animal. No truck. No pens full of strangers. "They're not stressed anyway because it's similar yards to what we drafted," Tom [told RNZ](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/country/570821/country-life-regenerative-farming-family-s-paddock-to-plate-butchery?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz). "They just wander on in here." Carcasses hang a week to ten days before boning, then go down the road to the shop. Tom's figures are about 1,000 cattle and 2,500 to 3,000 lambs a year, which by my arithmetic is somewhere near 3,750 animals. None of it is exported. They take in some outside animals too, which quietly makes that shed a piece of regional infrastructure rather than a private convenience. How unusual is this? When the government cut testing for small meat processors in December 2025, dropping carcass sampling from 60 to 30 in the first season and 12 after that, [Farmers Weekly reported](https://www.farmersweekly.co.nz/news/testing-reform-to-benefit-micro-abattoirs-and-farmers/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) the change would affect around six to twelve operators nationwide, in the band processing 200 to 2,000 animals a year. Food Safety Minister Andrew Hoggard said the old rules were "unnecessarily restrictive and costly" with no additional food safety benefit, and that he hoped the change would mean "a few more micro-abattoirs emerging around the country." Craig Phillips, who runs Southland's only micro-abattoir, named the structural problem: most large abattoirs are export oriented and have limited room for anyone putting through small numbers. Wholly Cow sits above that band. It is not a lifestyle-block operation. It is a genuinely small commercial processor, and those barely exist here. ## Why this matters if you buy organic meat When I went looking for [where to buy organic beef in New Zealand](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/where-to-buy-organic-beef-in-new-zealand/), I expected the bottleneck to be farms. It isn't. About 112 farms here hold organic certification covering cattle. Between all of them and your chiller sit five companies certified to turn a certified organic animal into meat you can buy. Five. That is the reason organic beef is a small shelf rather than a big one, and it has nothing to do with demand or with what happens in the paddock. The certificate follows the chain, not the farm. Every hand between paddock and plate has to be certified for the word to survive onto the label. Break it anywhere and the claim falls off, no matter how the animal lived. [Hickory Bay Farm](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/the-rothschild-the-surfer-and-the-beef-box/) on Banks Peninsula is BioGro certified and sells beef boxes that cannot say organic, because the cutting and packing step in its chain isn't. Waima Hill and The Organic Farm hit the same wall. The farms that clear it own the whole run. Juniper Hill in Hawke's Bay breeds, raises and processes pure Angus on one property through its own micro-abattoir and butchery, holding a certificate that covers slaughter and packing as well as farming. Almost nobody else does. Which is exactly the structure Tom and Carrie built, for entirely different reasons. One property, one kill room, one shop, no handoffs. The thing that stops certified organic beef reaching a counter is precisely the thing Wholly Cow doesn't have. They just never pointed it at certification, because that was never the goal. That is not a criticism. It is what makes them worth thinking about. The infrastructure organic meat needs already exists here in miniature, built by people who wanted control over their animals rather than a logo. It works. There is just about none of it. ## Everything else the animal turns into The name came from their son Reuben, who suggested "Wholly Cow" when he was ten. Good pun, serious intent. Liver, heart and kidney sit alongside the mince, and Luke says customers have come back to the organ meats looking for iron. Beef bones go into house-made dog food. As of late 2024, lamb bones go to a Taranaki jeweller, Rachel Lambert, who [turns them into earrings](https://www.waikatotimes.co.nz/nz-news/360501820/cambridge-butchery-wholly-cow-branches-out-bone-jewellery?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) sold at the front of the shop. Either the logical endpoint of whole-animal butchery or proof that this family cannot leave anything alone. Tallow does the most work. Carrie renders the fat from around the beef kidneys in a slow cooker, whips it in a kitchen mixer and packs it into tins as balm. More usefully, she coats paper bags in it so the butchery can wrap fresh meat without plastic film. Her own count, given to Farm Trader, is that this replaces about 800 plastic bags a week. Wholly Cow - Rural Delivery x Abattoir waste goes into hot compost with woodchips, straw and horse manure Tom trucks up from nearby racing stables. The piles reach 60 degrees, get turned every three months, and are ready after about a year. Paunch, cardboard and coffee grounds from local cafés go to worm beds. All of it ends up back on the paddocks that grow the grass that feeds the animals. Carrie also runs a chrome-free tannery, about twelve sheepskins a week, on equipment she picked up secondhand from a woman in the film industry. She told RNZ in August 2025 she sells the leather under the name Flock. One more detail, and it's my favourite. Every sausage, marinade and breadcrumb in the shop is gluten-free. Not as a market position. Luke is coeliac. Wholly Cow: Cambridge butcher's childhood dream come true | Country Life - RNZ Podcasts ## The word they never took In 2023 they entered the Ballance Farm Environment Awards and came away with [two](https://nzfetrust.org.nz/stories/tom-carrie-and-luke-andrews-of-wholly-cow/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz): the Waikato River Authority Catchment Improvement Award and the NZ Farm Environment Trust Innovation Award. Tom has since acquired a word for what he does without ever going looking for one. "People have now been starting to talk about this regenerative way," he told RNZ, "and it's probably something that we've already been doing for most of the time. I'm starting to call myself a regenerative farmer." Regenerative and organic get used as though they mean the same thing, and they don't. Running stock lightly and letting paddocks recover is regenerative grazing. It is not organic practice. The farm buys in young stock from wherever it can get it, with no requirement about how those animals were raised. Nobody at Wholly Cow has ever suggested otherwise. On a business this careful about everything else, the absence of an organic claim is itself a kind of answer. Tom and Carrie spoke at Underground's first festival in 2025\. In 2027 it comes to them. The programme already runs whole animal butchery and tannery sessions out in the field. At Wholly Cow those stop being demonstrations. It is just the place, running the way it runs every week, with several hundred people standing in it. --- *This is a heads-up piece ahead of* [*Underground Festival 2027*](https://www.undergroundfestival.co.nz/about?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz)*, not a review. I'll update it if anything changes before March.* **Before you go** If this was useful, [sign up free](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/#/portal/signup) and I'll send the next one. If you want to chip in, [there's a tip jar](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/#/portal/support).