About us
Slakteriet Bull is a collaboration between Bull Gård DA, run by Birger Bull, Siri Bull, and Lena Bye – and Vang Gård DA, run by brothers Einar and Bendik Bull.
We are all family. Birger and Lena co-own Bull Gård DA, which they founded in 2008. At that time, they were married and the farm was meant to become a workplace for Lena. Birger and Lena went their separate ways in 2012, but continued to share responsibility for the farm. Today, Siri – Birger’s wife – manages the daily operations at the farm. Lena works in production and serving at the Slaughterhouse, while Birger handles the administrative responsibilities for both Slakteriet Bull and Bull Gård DA.
Vang Gård is the Bull family’s ancestral farm – established by Birger and Kay Morten Bull’s great-grandparents, Einar and Borghild. In the 1950s, Grandfather Harald Bull and his wife Edny took over, and in 1974 they built a new goat barn. From 1995 to 1998 their son Bjørnar and his wife Marie ran the farm while Kay Morten attended agricultural school. At just 21 years old, Kay Morten took over in 1998 and ran the farm for 26 years – expanding operations, building a new barn, and, together with his brother Birger, Siri, and Lena, developing Slakteriet Bull, which was completed at Easter 2023. Today, Kay Morten works as butcher, sausage maker, and chef at Slakteriet Bull. At New Year 2024, Kay Morten’s sons Einar and Bendik, then 24 and 21 years old, took over Vang Gård.
At Slakteriet Bull you will also meet Marie Bull, grandmother and café manager – often assisted by grandchildren Karma, Elias, Ragnar, Harald, Hallgrim, and Håkon. Others in the team include relief worker Olaug, daughter-in-law Caroline, general manager and chef Julianne Johansen, sausage maker Hilde, and extra help/daughter-in-law Randi. We are a family business in every sense – we work together and make the most of each other’s strengths.
Slakteriet Bull is located on Vang Gård, where the Bull family has lived and farmed since 1921. Today, we manage our entire value chain ourselves, and our animals aren’t just “local” – they’re non-travelled!
Bull Gård supplies Aberdeen Angus to the Slaughterhouse, while Vang Gård provides goat, kid, and free-range pigs.
Everything on our menu was born, raised, and slaughtered by us. We place great emphasis on animal welfare, because there is a clear connection between animal welfare and quality meat! Our animals should live as good a life as possible while they are our production animals – and that’s what makes for truly great food.
Our animals
Here at Slakteriet Bull you’ll find premium meat from Aberdeen Angus cattle, goats, kids (young goats), and free-range pigs.
Angus
Aberdeen Angus – or Black Angus, as it’s often called on restaurant menus around the world – is one of the finest beef breeds when it comes to flavor and marbling.
Unlike Wagyu, Angus beef is not extremely marbled, but it offers a perfect balance of meat and fat, making it the ideal choice for tender, flavorful beef with excellent eating quality.
Our cattle are 100% grass-fed, roaming freely in forest pastures from late May until well into October. During winter, they are fed round bales of grass harvested in Grunnfjorden and surrounding villages. They are fenced with NoFence GPS collars, and in autumn they come home on their own – healthy, well-fed, and ready for a calm winter of rest and calving before the next outdoor season.
At present, we have a herd of around 40 cows, with calves and young stock bringing the total to about 100 animals. All male calves are castrated to achieve the same rich marbling and flavor typically found in heifers. Castration slows growth and reduces size, but the meat quality increases significantly.
Norwegian Dairy Goat
At Vang Farm, we produce goat’s milk, and the meat from the goats is a by-product of the dairy production. However, goat meat is an amazing raw material!
No other meat is as well suited for cured products, traditional dried ribs (pinnekjøtt), cured legs (fenalår), and sausages as goat. This is because goats have a unique biological trait: they continuously renew their body fat. While mutton fat becomes yellow and sometimes slightly rancid with age, goat fat stays white and flavorful, even in older animals. This means cured goat meat never turns rancid in the way cured mutton sometimes can. Goat meat also has a darker color and richer taste. The fat sits mostly on the outside or in small pockets within the muscle, making the meat lean yet full of flavor.
Goats are also very social and intelligent animals – they recognize their names and can be trained to do surprising things. They quickly learn how locks work, so you always need two types of locks on a goat gate!
Goats are delightful to work with – though sometimes a bit intense when you meet them out in the field. They rarely take no for an answer!
Kid (Young Goat)
Kid meat comes from young goats before they mature. It’s very lean, tender, and light in color – perfect for slow cooking, roasting, or thin-sliced dishes like kebab.
A kid tenderloin truly melts in your mouth.
Kids are playful, lively, and curious little creatures! Unfortunately, far more kids are born than needed for dairy production, which often leads to excess animals being culled on many goat farms. Here with us, however, we raise as many as possible to slaughter weight, turning them into delicious, sustainable food– a practice we’re very proud of.
Free-Range Pigs
Vang Farm also keeps free-range pigs – traditional pink pigs purchased as piglets in late winter. They start off in the goat barn until the weather warms up, then move outdoors for summer. There, they spend the season digging the soil between the barns, soaking up the sun, and growing big and happy. Free-range pigs may look like any other pig, but the difference in flavor and texture is remarkable. Living outdoors, rooting in the earth, and eating a varied diet gives the meat a depth of flavor that simply can’t be described – it must be tasted! You can meet the pigs in their pen throughout the summer – they’re always happy to greet visitors.
Our production
What is slaughtered and sold at Slakteriet Bull is not organic – it is sustainable.
We have chosen not to operate organically on any of our farms, and this is a conscious decision. In Northern Norway, running a certified organic farm would require significantly more land. Along the Troms coast, farmland is limited, and the distances between fields are long.
This means that operating organically would double our diesel consumption due to increased transportation needs. Instead, we use a minimal amount of mineral fertilizer on fields where we cannot spread manure, to ensure healthy grass growth. We use only about one-quarter of the fertilizer that many other farmers do, because we make maximum use of animal manure.
Manure is the best fertilizer soil can get — it contains everything found in artificial fertilizer.
The challenge, however, is transportation: manure is heavy, and it takes three tons of manure to replace 40 kilograms of artificial fertilizer. That’s why we spread manure on fields close to the farm, and use a small amount of fertilizer on those farther away.
For us, the calculation is simple: organic farming would not be sustainable. The transport emissions and costs would far outweigh the environmental benefit of avoiding artificial fertilizer.
In our situation, it would be madness to double our diesel use and emissions just to be able to say we are “organic.”
Our claim is that our way of farming is considerably more sustainable and environmentally friendly than that of many farms certified as organic by Debio.
When we slaughter Angus cattle, they have lived entirely off natural pasture, feeding themselves without any artificial additives or supplemental feed. This is, in many ways, more organic than many so-called organic farms that raise bulls intensively indoors on cultivated feed.
Goats that are not kept for continued milk production are also slaughtered in the autumn — after grazing freely all summer. This natural diet affects both the pH value and the omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid balance in the meat, improving both quality and nutrition.
There are many factors to consider, and each farm must adapt to its own conditions.
For us, conventional but sustainable farming is the best approach — and we are confident it’s the right choice. For others, the circumstances may be different.
The Slaughter Process
The slaughtering process at Slakteriet Bull represents the greatest animal welfare improvement we have ever made on our farms.
Today, slaughterhouses in Norway are few and far between, and it is not uncommon for animals to be transported 3–6 hours by truck before slaughter. Once there, they are kept in an unfamiliar environment — strange sounds, new smells, away from their herd and home.
This is undoubtedly stressful for the animal, and stress affects the pH level of the meat, increasing testosterone and stress hormones. These changes cannot be reversed, no matter how much the meat is aged, tenderized, or processed. The pH level at the moment of slaughter stays with the meat all the way to the plate.
At our farm, this is no longer the case. Our animals never travel. They simply walk out into the yard, get a little treat in the feeding rack, maybe a scratch behind the ear — and then, in an instant, it’s over. Life as a production animal ends respectfully and calmly, with no fear, no stress, surrounded by people and places they know. We are proud to give our animals such an ending to their lives — and we stand firmly behind our belief that this results in better-quality meat, without question.
