Petition: An Expert Counted 600 Acts of Cruelty at This Award-Winning Farm. Tesco Was Selling Its Milk.

Jenny Mace, a visiting scholar in animal welfare at the University of St Andrews, sat down with two hours of undercover footage from a dairy farm in Essex and counted. Her audit logged more than 600 separate instances of workers inflicting avoidable pain, fear and distress on cows. The footage came from Albyns Farm at Stapleford Tawney, an award-winning operation on Crown Estate land, run by Curtismill Holsteins, housing around 700 cows indoors year-round. Its milk went to Tesco and to Müller. Both suspended the farm within days of the footage becoming public in August 2026. Please sign the petition asking the Crown Estate to end the lease and Tesco and Müller to remove the farm permanently.

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The word doing the most work in this story is “award-winning.” Albyns is not a backyard operation that slipped through a gap in the system; it is a nationally recognised farm on royal land supplying two of the biggest names in British dairy, and it passed as exemplary while this was happening. The footage, gathered over an 18-month investigation by activist and filmmaker Joey Carbstrong, shows workers punching, kicking and slapping cows, whipping them with towels across the face, ribs and udders, prodding them with sharp goads, and twisting their tails. Tails are densely packed with nerves, which is why government slaughterhouse guidance prohibits handling them at all. In one 2024 clip a worker runs a lit cigarette down a cow’s face. Mace’s report describes animals panicking against the neck bars of artificial insemination racks while being shouted at and struck. Calves were dragged away from their mothers by a single leg. One cow too weak to stand was lifted with a tractor.

Curtismill Holsteins says it was extremely disappointed by the footage, has dismissed the employees at fault, commissioned an independent investigation including an audit by an external welfare specialist, installed additional CCTV and increased staff training. The Crown Estate, which leases the land but does not manage the farm, says it does not condone violence toward animals and is looking into what happened. Nobody has been charged, and those responses may be entirely sincere. But this is the fourth UK supply-chain cruelty case in roughly a year, and the pattern is what matters: One Green Planet has covered calf abuse at a Müller-linked livestock centre that ended in lifetime bans, and separately cruelty documented on Red Tractor welfare-certified farms. Assurance labels keep certifying farms that undercover cameras then expose. The specific asks here are the only ones that outlast a news cycle: a permanent end to the lease, and permanent removal from both supply chains, because suspensions get quietly lifted once attention moves on. The case is reported by the Essex Gazette. If you would rather not fund this at all, the dairy aisle now has alternatives that carry no supply chain to audit.

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