Lenah Game Meats
Healthy Ethical Tasmanian
We believe that our meat is good for you,
makes environmental sense and is produced
using ethical principles.
Vision
Lenah produces Tasmanian foods that are good for people and good for the planet
Values
RESPECT
We respect our products, our people, the country on which we operate and the traditional owners of this land.
PRODUCTS
We have unique products that are TASTY, enjoyable, healthy and ethically produced. We protect and seek to maximise these qualities. We strive for best practice in all we do.
PEOPLE AND PLANET
The two are intertwined for us.
The planet provides our lifeforce – it’s our home. We do what we can to take care of it with the same love we do our family and the community.
SUSTAINABILITY
We believe in meeting the needs of the present without diminishing opportunities for the future. We work to contribute to a humane society that is ecologically, socially and environmentally secure.
TRANSPARENCY
We work to build open and honest relationships with all of our partners, staff, suppliers, government and customers. We take a proactive approach to our business, social and environmental responsibilities.
FOOD SECURITY
Our system of harvesting meat is all about balance, harmony and consciousness of the planet, its peoples and animals. Our methods of food harvesting are good for people and good for he planet.
Mission
Driven by our aspirations and core values we are passionate about healthy food produced in an ethical and environmentally sensitive way.
All that we do is driven by our passion to enrich our planet and it’s inhabitants. Making the world an economically, socially and environmentally safe place for our children is our number one priority.
We will achieve our mission through:
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Educating our consumers and industry partners
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Offering healthy and sustainable food alternatives that we want to give our children and grandchildren
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Ensuring everything we do is in balance with nature
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Practising ethical animal welfare in line with Government regulations
Our Vision Expanded
Lenah is driven by a vision of a more sustainable future for grazing agriculture in this land. We believe that it makes great environmental wisdom to produce our food from the animals and plants which belong here. Our vision is the long standing paradigm that native animals such as wallaby are pests, which need to be replaced by good European farm animals, will change.
We’re not alone in this. The United Nations, International Union for the Conservation of Nature has a long-standing policy to support the commercial use of wildlife which states in part, “Use of wild living resources, if sustainable, is an important conservation tool because the social and economic benefits derived from such use provide incentives for people to conserve them.” (1)
Many Australian nature conservation groups including the Australian Wildlife Management Society, and individual ecologists such as Dr Tim Flannery, Prof Michael Archer, Dr David Fruedenburger, as well as many Aboriginal organisations, also promote further development of the kangaroo and wallaby industries for similar reasons (2).
Australian ecologists note that kangaroos and wallaby have much lower water requirements than cattle or sheep, have soft feet which are gentle on our fragile soils, Australia plants are adapted to and in some cases reliant on the grazing habits of wallaby and kangaroo and represent a huge under-utilised food resource (3).
Lenah’s vision of an agricultural enterprise based on wallaby isn’t that we start keeping wallaby behind fences, sticking drench guns down their throats and breeding bigger and better wallaby. Rather in some of their back country, farmers may decrease their sheep numbers, devote a feed resource to wallaby and let their populations increase. The farmers themselves harvest the wallaby as a farm enterprise and devote some of their famous ingenuity towards devising systems to improve the efficiency of harvest operations by managing their wallaby population as a farm resource.
This discussion is mirrored in the current debate about fire management in Australia. As a nation we are starting to realise that our management of natural resources in the past century has had flaws and we need to seriously change some old paradigms.
We suspect we won’t see this vision realised in our lifetimes, but we do hope the ground work we have laid with Lenah in challenging an old paradigm and developing markets, will see it eventually become a reality.
