Not everyone can look at the skeletal remains of a roast lamb dinner and see something useful. But Carrie Andrews of Wholly Cow butchery has a knack of turning waste into wonder.
It was 2024, and Carrie and her family had just finished eating the lamb in question. As she was cleaning up, she looked at the lamb leg bone and thought: “I could make something with this.”
“I pulled out the bone and I washed it – it was so beautiful,” says Carrie, who has a background in fine arts, craft and design. “I thought: ‘if I cut it up I could make beautiful earrings.’”
With many projects on the go already, Carrie wisely decided not to make the jewellery herself. Instead, she contacted Taranaki-based jeweller Rachel Lambert and asked if she’d like to make earrings out of the bones for Carrie to sell at her Cambridge butcher shop. Rachel loved the idea, and suddenly a side hustle had been created out of nothing.
“Rachel’s pieces always go into design stores or galleries, so for her, selling through our butchery is opening up a whole new market. And at the same time, we get to support an artist.”
Creating a second life with animal waste is second nature to Carrie, who together with her husband, Tom, runs Wholly Cow – a regenerative meat operation that integrates a 186-hectare sheep and beef farm, an on-site micro abattoir, and a family-owned butchery in the heart of Cambridge.
Started in 2009, Wholly Cow embodies the couple’s deep commitment to ethical, “paddock-to-plate” farming, holistic land management and local food distribution. The biodiverse farm is run on closed-loop regenerative principles, with soil health at the centre of it all. All fertiliser is created on farm through their own extensive compost operation, which receives a constant stream of bones, skins and offal from the micro-abattoir.
As Carrie says, a major part of her and Tom’s journey has involved letting go and assisting nature – “the amazing engineer” – do her work.
“Nature is the key here,” says Carrie. “Sometimes we all think we’re so clever, but all you need to do is step back and look at the structure and the engineering that goes into the whole environment. It makes you want to take care of her more.”
Paddock to plate
In today’s agricultural sector with its emphasis on intensive production, maximum yields and export markets, Wholly Cow stands out as an old-fashioned farming operation catering exclusively to a local community.
Animals are raised, slaughtered and processed on farm, and the meat is sold to the local community through the butchery. With all of it owned and operated by the Andrews family, they retain full control over the production, distribution and retail. This means they don’t have to rely on third-party infrastructure, retaining more margin for themselves while passing on savings to the customers.
It also means that animals do not have to endure lengthy and stressful transportation and processing, which results in better quality, fresher meat for the customer.
Carrie calls her operation “hyper local”, preferring to only sell her meat to the Cambridge community through the butchery. “We just sell local. It’s not a competition. Our aim is to go back to the land, do a good job and keep it at a fair price. We could probably charge a lot more for what we do, but it’s not about that. We’re just common folk and this is what we do.”
The butchery is run by Carrie and Tom’s son Luke, and Carrie works in the butchery on Mondays. Along with providing high quality, regenerative meat, the butchery offers the community the opportunity to do something incredibly rare these days – connect directly with the farmers.
For Carrie, meeting customers is a special part of the business that is not available to many other farmers that rely on the faceless infrastructure between producer and retailer.
“I came away from the butcher the other day thinking how rewarding it is to meet the entire spectrum of the community. We don’t have a typical customer – it’s a whole range of people who shop with us, which allows us to have that connection. They’ve got a trustworthy source of food, and they can rely on us to produce quality meat.”
One woman’s treasure
Anyone who’s processed a beast before knows how much waste is left over. It can be tricky to find a home for hefty skins, buckets of offal and kilos of bones, and even composting such a volume of animal parts can be overwhelming unless you have a big system in place.
While most people would simply bury or dispose of this byproduct, Carrie has created a whole new life cycle based on her artistic passion. Not only does she get her bones turned into jewellery, but she also renders the fat from the processed animals and turns it into tallow skin care products. She infuses the tallow with herbs and hemp oil, packages each product in recycled material from old magazines, and sells them from the butchery.
She also coats all the paper bags used in the butchery with tallow, which helps repel moisture and prevent the bags from going soggy. Organs that can’t be sold or reused are turned into dog food which is also sold from the butchery.
For Carrie, who used to watch her mother and grandmother make and use tallow, it’s all about channelling the thrift and resourcefulness of older generations.
“Waste is a really big thing for me. I suppose it’s the artistic lens of looking at it in different ways. It’s like leftovers. My grandmother wasted nothing because of the times where we had scarcity, whereas now we live in abundance, but we’re all kind of mentally poor and time poor.
“You have to make use of what you have.”
The last sheep tannery in New Zealand
But perhaps the most ambitious feat of Carrie’s reuse aspirations is what she does with the sheep skins that come out of the micro-abattoir – she turns them into leather products.
With a small micro-tannery set up in an old shed on the farm, Carrie does all the fleshing, pickling, tanning, dyeing and drying by hand – carrying out a once widespread craft that has largely been lost from New Zealand.
“I think I’m the only person in New Zealand doing sheep leather right now,” she says. “Which is crazy because the South Island used to be full of little tanneries making leather. And now they’re all gone.”
Carrie’s journey into leatherwork began years ago, when she experimented with ways to make leather naturally without the use of chrome, which is widespread in commercial manufacturing.
She met a man named David who had worked in a tannery for 20 years, and she effectively became his apprentice, calling him with questions and occasionally flying down to Christchurch for lessons.
After purchasing some old leather-making equipment from the Lord of the Rings TV show production and some closed-down tanneries, she set them up in her farm shed and got to work, gradually developing a hybrid process that integrates traditional methods with modern technologies and makes good use of the steady supply of skins from the abattoir.
“I only do sheep skins as they’re much more practical. They are much easier for me to handle, because I do the fleshing by hand. Sheep leather is also much softer than cow leather.”
As much as Carrie’s leatherwork is driven by her personal interest in fine arts and creativity, it’s never done in isolation, and she’s always thinking about how it can benefit others. All too aware that artisanal leatherwork is on a constant decline in New Zealand, she began looking around for local crafts people who might be interested in taking her leather and turning it into NZ-made products.
She eventually found a leather maker in the rural Marlborough Sounds called Laura Jane who was only too happy to take the job and gain access to genuine NZ sheep and lamb skins, which can only be sourced from European tanneries these days.
“If we don’t support craftspeople, then everything just goes offshore, and all that knowledge is lost. With Laura, if she wanted lamb leather she would have to purchase it from Italy because all the New Zealand tanneries are closed. So now, she has a whole skin to work with and gets to be as creative as she wants. It’s more challenging using a whole skin, but probably more rewarding.”
Thanks to Laura, Carrie now has a range of bags, sunglasses pouches, shoes and card holders which she stocks in the butchery under her brand Flock, alongside the jewellery.
“There’s so much work and method to get the best out of skin. All of these pieces are unique and they last a lifetime,” she says.
“Seeing the bones return as these beautiful crafted earrings, and the bags come back made so meticulously – it’s so rewarding. If you told me, when I left art school, that I’d be buying a farm, I wouldn’t believe you. But now all those craft skills are coming into play and we’re able to support two artists.”
Carrie says she couldn’t have learned her leatherwork without the hands-on tutelage of her mentors. “I really like that human connection of learning from a person. I need to be shown. That’s why it’s better for me to have people around to respect and acknowledge their skills. I couldn’t have gotten to where I am with my leatherwork through YouTube.”
Closing the circle
Alongside the animals, a key feature of the farm itself is the extensive compost system which provides a huge volume of nutrient-rich fertiliser that can be broadcast over the pasture. With so much animal offal coming from the abattoir, setting up the system was a no-brainer to Carrie and Tom.
“It’s a small mountain,” says Carrie. “Tom’s got a massive digger which he uses to turn it. We’ve got truckloads of carbon waste that comes out of the stables, which we mix with the nitrogen waste that comes from the abattoir. We leave it for 18 months, and the microbes do their job, then we put it on with a tractor. It’s amazing. People go buy blood and bone – but this is it right here!”
“The cattle that come through, parts of them go back to the paddocks that they were raised on,” adds Tom. “I think we’ve fully closed the circle!”
Next to the compost mountain is a huge worm farm system, which Carrie feeds with the paper and cardboard waste from the butchery, creating a steady stream of vermicast which can also be applied on the farm.
For Carrie and Tom, joyfully participating in nature’s process is what farming’s all about.
“Sometimes farming gets lost in this business, business, business mindset. And that doesn’t leave space for the farmer’s enjoyment. To get out in the fresh air and to see your animals and to hear the sounds of nature – that’s part of the joy.”
It’s hard work of course, and the couple have had to adapt to make it manageable. They’ve had to stop calving and lambing due to a lack of time alongside their many other jobs, and instead now purchase heifers and lambs to fatten on farm. Nor do they have the resources to hire staff, and most of the jobs they have to do themselves.
But knowing that they’re not stuck in a high-pressure cycle of export production makes it worth doing. “It can sometimes be easy to get fixated on the idea of bigger and more, but I push back against that,” says Carrie. “It’s not always convenient and it’s still business, but you can incorporate your family and your community, and it’s been a financial success.
“When I step back and look at what we do, I just think, ‘wow, this is our life’. I love every part of it.
“We know what our ‘why’ is.”
This story first appeared in On the Land Issue 3. Subscribe here to support more stories like this and get On the Land direct to your door.