Lamb-in-a-box to stop crofters being fleeced

Published on Sunday 14 October 2007 00:08

IT IS a far cry from boil-in-the-bag. Hebridean crofters are offering online shoppers a £100 "lamb-in-a-box" in an effort to bypass the supermarkets.

They want to sell mainland buyers an island lamb or sheep which has been killed and cut up into joints ready for cooking or storing in the freezer.

Islanders hope their scheme will revitalise crofting in the islands and allow them to get a better price for their produce.

Over the past century, the population of the Outer Hebrides has halved as young people looked for work elsewhere. Margins between the prices which farmers and crofters receive for their produce and the prices charged in shops are a major source of frustration. A typical lamb may fetch just 25 a head.

The Office of Fair Trading is investigating claims that major supermarkets are using their buying power to force producers into accepting rock bottom prices for their wares.

The scheme involves consumers ordering either a lamb or a whole sheep online from the team of crofters who have banded together under the name Heather Isle Meats. The animal is then delivered in ready-to-cook pieces which can either go straight into the oven or grill or be stored in the fridge or freezer. The crofters aim to have the animal delivered anywhere in the UK in 48 hours.

The service is available between August and January, when lambs and sheep are slaughtered on the islands.

The islanders say killing the sheep on the island is more humane because the animals avoid the stress of a journey by lorry and ferry before being slaughtered on the mainland. They say sending food from croft to door is better for the environment than lorries transporting produce to shops and consumers driving to superstores.

Kevin Kennedy, a Lewis crofter involved in the scheme, said: "We've started this scheme because of the prices we were getting. You sell lambs on the mainland, you will easily get 45 each. We will be lucky if we make 35 maximum and it's more like 25. We hope to make a start through people from the islands who live on the mainland and who know how good the lamb from here is.

"You could say that we should have been doing something like this a long time ago, but we are getting on with it now."