Meat Production in Germany Sees Slight Increase in 2024
According to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the preliminary results show a 1.4% increase in the country’s meat production in 2024 compared to the previous year. The industrial slaughterhouses produced 6.9 million tons of meat, a 97,200-ton increase from the previous year. This marks the first increase in the domestic meat production since 2016, when it reached 8.4 million tons.
In 2024, a total of 48.7 million animals, including pigs, cattle, sheep, goats and horses, as well as 693.3 million poultry, were slaughtered in the slaughterhouses. The number of slaughtered pigs increased by 1.2% to 44.6 million, with a 1.6% increase in the number of domestically raised pigs to 43.3 million and a 9.2% decrease in the number of imported pigs to 1.3 million.
Germany’s slaughterhouses produced approximately 4.3 million tons of pork in 2024, a 1.9% or 80,500-ton increase from the previous year, but still lower than the 2016 record of 5.6 million tons.
The number of cattle slaughtered remained almost unchanged, with a 0.1% increase to 3 million, but the weight of the slaughtered cattle increased, leading to a 1.2% increase in the production of beef to 1 million tons.
The production of poultry meat increased by 0.3% to 1.6 million tons, mainly due to a 1.8% increase in the production of young turkey meat to 1.1 million tons. In contrast, the production of pheasant meat decreased by 2.1% to 408,100 tons.
In total, 653.8 million chickens, including 626.7 million young and 27.1 million broiler chickens, were slaughtered in the slaughterhouses in 2024, along with 30.2 million pheasants and 9.3 million ducks, according to the statistics.