TAKING OUR SERVICES OUT THERE
Quail meat to market by Dr Graham Leask
T
The second of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of Western Cape agriculture is to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture”. An inseparable part of food security is food safety. Veterinary Public Health (VPH), a subprogramme of Veterinary Services, is acutely involved in assuring the safety of the meat and meat products that are produced in the Western Cape.
Food security can come in all shapes and sizes, as officials of VPH recently discovered when approving and registering a new abattoir for the slaughter of quail.
46 AgriProbe Vol 20 | No 1 | 2023
Although the quail is a small bird, with a slaughter weight of approximately 200g, all the same structural and procedural requirements for an abattoir to slaughter quail need to be met. VPH officials played an important role in assisting the owner to meet all these requirements so that a wholesome product that is safe for human consumption can be produced in the abattoir. In South Africa quail meat currently has a small niche market aimed mainly at the upmarket restaurants that cater for the tourist. This new abattoir currently has a low daily throughput with which it hopes to supply the small local restaurant market in the Western Cape, and have sufficient stock to distribute to outlets in the rest of the country, too.