It’s summer 2012 in Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, and Broughgammon are stationed at the annual Auld Lammas Fair for the first time. They haven’t sold a burger all day. “Goat burgers!?” is mumbled by passing festival-goers in collective hesitance as they sidle up to the familiar counters of beef burger vans and kebab stands. Anything beyond the fair’s specialities of salt-crusted dulse and bags of yellow man—a brittle kind of toffee, the colour of egg yolk—is an exotic addition.

[Please be advised that this story features photography of whole-animal butchery that some readers may find distressing.]

Later that night their first customer, filled to the brim with beer and a pint of Dutch courage, rolls up to the open window of Broughgammon’s food truck. A positive experience, no doubt, as word-of-mouth quickly spread and festival revellers lined, hungrily in their masses, at the van’s kerbside for the rest of the weekend. The bite of a single goat burger—lightly spiced, sweeter than lamb, less buttery than beef—was enough to instil years of want. Today, Broughgammon can barely keep up with demand.

On Northern Ireland’s North Coast, an ethical goat meat farm makes for a unique neighbour to its resident farmers of beef, sheep and dairy. When I arrive there on a lashing September afternoon, I’m met by Millie Cole and her son, Charlie; Millie along with her husband, Robin, bought the farm back in 2002 and have lived here since.

Broughgammon—before it became Broughgammon—was Millie and Robin’s farmstead paradise; their one-way ticket to living the good life. When they arrived from England, they had no plans to commercially farm. That wasn’t until 2011 when Charlie descended on their 48 acres after leaving his job as an Estate Manager in England and brought that exact intention with him. “You know at school when you would do the career guidance stuff?” Charlie says. “I didn't like anything on the list. I didn't want to go to uni or anything like that.”

“My parents were adamant I had to get a degree, so I found this course called rural management. I thought the work was going to be hands-on and physical, but it was more office-based. I just always wanted to do farming.” Now in 2020, Charlie is the farm’s manager and lives here with his wife, Becky, and their two young kids, in the eco-house he built on his parent’s property.

“Growing up, we always hunted and fished,” Charlie recounts. “When mum and dad bought the farm, they had Soay sheep [a breed of sheep descended from the island of Soay in the St. Kilda Archipelago] and we basically put our skills to use to butcher our own lamb.” As an apprentice butcher back in the day, Millie dispensed the necessary know-how to get the job done.

When Charlie learned of the reality of baby goats in the dairy industry—the majority of males are euthanised at birth by a lack of want—the call for high-welfare farming soon followed. “We knew this was happening on dairy farms in England,” he says. “But we had no idea how we’d go about it here.”

A couple of phone calls to an Irish goat society and Charlie had the necessary contacts: one for a farmer who could give him 30 goats to trial and the other for a man who would buy them when they were ready for the abattoir.

“When the goats were ready to be processed, the guy couldn’t take them,” Charlie tells me. “We were stuck with 30 goats and nowhere to sell them.” This was the summer of 2012. The Lammas fair was on their doorstep. It was time to make burgers.

***

We make our way to a small stone-built barn stationed at the entranceway to the main yard, a rock’s throw from the farm shop. Inconspicuous on the outside, this on-site butchery is where their goats come home from the slaughter, ready to be carved by the hands that reared them.

The kid goats live 100 yards from the butchery, in two large adjoining barns with an open rear end leading onto acres of field. The sound of the herd—135 by rough estimation—greet you before they do, like hecklers at a football game, stirred into a frenzy by the promise of a bucket filled with feed; their ‘baa’s and ‘aah’s ricocheting off the corrugated rooftop.

The goat kids are kept in pens. As agile jumpers, they’re goat-proofed to avoid wondering escapees. Each pen is tubed up to a feeding machine—the “milk made 2000”—which pumps a milk replacer into the enclosure through rubber teats. Either that or they’re hand-fed by Becky, who becomes a human climbing frame in the process.

““By rearing animals that are being put down at birth, we’re saying ‘guys, what the fuck is happening with the food industry?’””

Since their first appearance at the Lammas Fair, Broughgammon’s orphan goat rearing has expanded to a capacity of 300 goats this year alone—that’s 300 goats saved from the waste bin of an inherently broken system; along with their bull calves, who without Broughgammon, would have been shot at birth, shipped to Europe at six weeks old or intensively reared.

“This is the biggest thing we can do to make change,” says Charlie. “By rearing animals that are being put down at birth, we're saying ‘guys, what the fuck is happening with the food industry?’ Surely it’s obvious that there’s something wrong.”

***

In the face of Covid-19, like much of society, their Art of Butchery classes are postponed. I’m a class of one, masked and hair-netted, white coat robed to boot.

“Never in a month of Sundays did I picture myself doing this,” Millie says. We’re standing inside the butchery around a long butcher’s block; instruments for all kinds of slicing and dicing are hung from the table and against the back wall. An old cleaver— a souvenir from her apprenticing days as the only female in an all-bloke butchery in Wiltshire—watches over her.

It’s been a normal week on the butchery front: a large bin in the fridge holds the bones of five goats and two of their rose veal bull calves; each free-range and hand-reared in paddocks and barns nearby. The bull calves are called “rose” veal due to their high welfare rearing, where grazing access to acres of grass produces meat richly tinted pink and different to traditional veal, where their diet is often restricted.

Millie is standing opposite me, sharpening the blade of a scimitar knife, light and agile to wield, sharp as the tip of a pin. “I tell everybody: the most important thing is a sharp knife,” she says, whipping her blade through the prongs of a white handled sharpener. “If it’s not sharp, you’ll cut yourself.” I marvel at the irony of less threat from a sharper tool. “It’s true. If it’s blunt, you’re pushing desperately.”

The carcass on the table is eight days old, I’m told. Not eight days old in life, but eight days old in death. Millie explains how it’s butchered into quarters (more thirds, mathematically-speaking, than “quarters”). Each quarter caters to differing tastes: chump roasts, bone-rolled shoulders, loin cutlets (or bacon, to regular folk), ribs, a belly roast or neck fillets, among others.

I watch as Millie gets to work, sliding the smooth silver of her carving knife through the bright red loin of the cabrito goat. She separates it into its quarters, counting five ribs down from the neck—“where the front shoulders are, so you’re left with a rack of eight of ribs.” She slaps the carcass over to the other side and counts again. The room smells sweet and slightly spiced; it’s a smell redolent of their bacon rashers, which taste like coriander seed and cracked black pepper. The Billy Burger, their first product, and unquestionably a firm contender for most popular, is made using an in-house recipe with the herbs and spices standing on shelves at the back.

“This is the tricky part,” she warns, then out comes the saw. Her knuckles tighten into a pale white grasp around a wobbly thigh muscle that jiggles under the backwards-forwards of a hacksaw grinding through bone; a motion to cut a shank. Other cuts demand equally adept knife-work; some require a more precise slice to part muscle from bone in a single, seamless swipe.

“If you were to buy a piece of meat from a butcher, a good butcher, it should be nice and dry on the outside,” she tells me. I lean forwards to stroke the side of the carcass; it feels like chilled play-doh.

She takes the chump roast and wraps it with three bands of elastic string – “we used to do this by hand,” she adds. “But life is too short” – and sets it on the table beside the chop and the shank. Every cut is weighed and packaged in the same room, and I’m given the lot to take with me.

***

I think of shopping for meat in the supermarket: of the plastic film, the polystyrene trays and the slabs of meat stored on them—some dyed red for extra appeal, some pumped with water as a questionable “binding agent.” In comparison to Broughgammon, where ethics and locality are at the top of their agenda, supermarket meat is a product we're wholly detached from by time and place.

I ask Charlie if he thinks we’ve lost our respect for the meat on our plates. If the supermarket stands to say anything, then we probably have. “Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has a concept that you can’t eat meat unless you take an animal’s life,” he replies. “You need to have that respect for what the product is.”

Charlie reckons our respect has been replaced with squeamishness, as a symptom of our divorce from meat, aided by the over-mechanisation of its production. I can’t overlook how butchery is a craft built on human touch; it’s visceral, and much like cooking, it’s a flesh-to-flesh affair. It’s a connection we’ve been robbed of in the manic hustle for factory-farmed, mass-marketed everything.

“The hope with our butchery classes is that we’re getting people to realise the nose-to-tail potential,” he continues. “If we’re taking an animal’s life, we need to respect that.”

When I get home, I cook the shanks and the chump roast for a group of four. The juices crackle in the pan as it cooks. Once it’s on the plate, it’s mouth-wateringly tender and the flesh flakes off the bone. It’s served in a white wine jus, with roasted carrots and a round of spuds. The meat is mildly fragrant and slightly herbal, maybe a testament to the herbal leys the goats are reared on. Or maybe it’s the taste of the good life.