[Clansman]

just trying to make the point..

I get a lot of people preaching to me about how bad the commercial poultry industry is and yet they've never set foot in a commercial farm.

usually their opinion is based on a conversation with someone in a pub who once worked as casual labour for a weekend on a chicken farm 10 years ago. 

The commercial poultry industry gets a very bad press especially amongst the smallholder communities who mainly appear to base their opinions on what they 'think' or have been told its like, rather than have an opinion based on any actual fact.

It's the old "Why let the truth get in the way of a good story" thing... commercial livestock farming is always fair game for a good kicking.

Don't get me wrong, I have seen instances of bad practice, cruelty, poor animal husbandry etc on commercial farms, it does happen, however that is down to bad individuals not adhering to rules/guidelines, its never due to company policies or strategies.

I don't think the layman really appreciates just how strict the welfare standards in modern animal farming now are.

20 or 30 years ago yes, some companies did run poor operations but in todays world the supermarket is king, they rule the roost and if the producer steps out of line even slightly they will be history.

The supermarkets will NOT be cutting back on welfare standards just to sell us a £2 chicken, that won't ever happen, image is everything, imagine the press getting hold of it! "Supermarket A drops its Welfare Standards!" It would be financial suicide for any supermarket.

You made a statement about welfare standards costing money, birds living in misery and bad conditions due to Aldi, Lidl and Morrisons and suggested that food producers and farmers you know and have dealings with may be cutting back on their welfare standards to reduce costs?

So, can you back up your claims?

are these food producers and farmers you know deliberately cutting back on the welfare standards of their animals to save costs?

[devonlad]

youre not going to let me walk away are you Clansman- clearly the use of some amusing emoticons hasn't done the trick- so here goes
Firstly, I mentioned my association with the agricultural industry, not to claim that I could fly a Boeing 747 into Kathmandu airport, between the lowering foothills of the Himalayas, - at night, but simply to make it clear that I live, work and have always done so around farming. my father was a herdsman on a dairy farm and I now work in an on farm advisory capacity re crop nutrition  I therefore do not see the business of raising animals for meat on a large scale through rose tinted spectacles. I see it for the grisly business it undoubtedly is. Easier for the general population to look the other way most of the time. and that's within the admittedly higher welfare standards that now exist in the uk.
For me, simply because a farming practice is legally acceptable, or a bit better than it was 20 years ago, doesn't make it "acceptable" not to me anyway.SO, on that point, have I seen a reduction in standards because supermarkets have gone to war over chicken pricing-? not especially, not yet anyway, but I don't think we had too much to be proud of to start with. Later I will refer again to an article featuring the concerns of Dr Tracey Jones of Compassion In world farming talking specifically about the impact on animal welfare of the chicken price war, (watch out there's gonna be some quotes) Within it Waitrose respond to concerns about them selling £2 chickens by asserting ( and I have no reason to disbelieve them) that the chickens used have had no reduction in living space - slightly less than a square foot per bird I believe- legally ok but not ok surely !
My mentioning certain cut price supermarkets is that I see them as being at the forefront of the devaluing of food. Maybe it is so that they only stock "British" meat so we can rest easy, but the meat in packs in the fridge or frozen section is only a fraction of the meat based products sold. tins of steak, chicken kievs, tuna, corned beef, salmon, ( don't get me started on the barbaric reality of salmon farming) and endless lines of product all which rely on an animal based ingredient or two. all being sold at a price that leaves me open mouthed. For another day, but already the feature of a previous post on here is the reality that anything up to half of all the worlds food is thrown away. in 2013 the institute of mechanical engineers stated that it was half.  surely a chicken bought for £2 can only encourage even more waste. our Christmas goose cost us £60 =- not a morsel of that birds edible fibre was left unturned. it was roasted , boiled, curried, sandwiched, and souped ? within an inch of its life. we'd have done that anyway cos its what we do, but I do know people in my own family who buy  £2 chicken cut out the breast and throw the rest away.
RIGHT i'm digressing- animal welfare and that "evidence you seek. not sure if this is evidence but I would consider it to be slightly more credible than some poor deluded hobby farmer in devon. An article was published in the telegraph very recently under the headline "Chicken Wars: Waitrose sells whole bird for £2.11"
In it Dr Tracey Jones expresses concern at the impact this price battle will have on animal welfare and specifically
" Our desire for cheaper chicken is pushing some producers to erode the higher welfare standards the UK established in 2010..... As we consume more and more chicken at ever lower prices, such economic pressure drives faster growth rates, increases the number of birds in each shed and thwarts all efforts to thwart foodborne diseases such as campylobacter"
This final point is further supported ( at least for me it is !) by the findings by the Food Standards Agency  in November 2014 that " 7 in 10 chickens sold in British supermarkets are contaminated with Campylobacter... Campylobacter is not just a public health issue but an animal welfare issue too.. our desire for cheap chicken which is driving down prices is a fundamental barrier to solving this issue.. it pushes producers to use chicken breeds with higher growth rates, increase the number of birds in the shed which are bad for animal welfare and increase the likelihood of Campylobacter"

My original post bemoaned the impact of cheaper and cheaper food on the quality of that food and questioned how it is possible to sell a chicken for £2 and ensure that animal had a good life. It also stated how lucky I am to not have to opt for eating an animal that lived its life in such conditions. last week we collected 6 of our lambs from the butcher, they were born in March and lived for 10 months in the outdoors, with room to roam, treated with care and indeed affection bordering on love. my sister in law lives nearby and raises table birds in her 2 acre paddock which we swap for our lamb. god we're lucky.
in the next 50 years the worlds population is set to double and this "golden" era of limitless supplies of cheap food may not last. but for now I can only see that undervalued food, with BOGOFs everywhere, treated with such a "throw away" mentality leads to a disdain for the life of the animal.
I'm sure we wont see eye to eye on this, and that's fine- but I wont post again. 

[devonlady]

I don't know who has the right of it, but I do know that meat should not be cheap, cheaply reared or any meat animal's life cheapened. I know I couldn't rear a chicken as I would like it reared and get the flavour I would like and make a profit or break even at £2 a bird or even £6!
My birds are reared over summer/autumn on free range and have whole wheat morning and evening. I couldn't get them to weight in the few weeks that broilers take, they take 4-6months.
If I couldn't rear my own meat then I would rather eat it 4 times a year than eat the tasteless, doubtful stuff  from the supermarket.
I know nothing about the broiler industry other than Hugh FW's campaign and hearsay, maybe I should find out more.
I have a feeling though that I will still prefer my tasty free range birds who have had a good life and a quick and kind end.

[Stereo]

I suppose it's just one person's opinion against another. Whether a bird should be raised in a closed shed with only 1 square foot each is up to the individual. I keep my hens in pens that give them 10 square meters each. Some will say this is overkill, some may say it's cruel and that I should give them total freedom. You just have to decide for yourself what is acceptable and live by it.

One of the issues I have, aside from rearing animals in conditions where they never see the light of day, is the processing. Such huge volumes go through the plants that there is bound to be suffering on a huge scale. These plants presumably have targets for successful stunning and I'm sure it's not 100% which means that thousands of birds are going to the neck cutter un-stunned. I've heard second hand tales of birds being mechanically eviscerated while still alive but don't have any real evidence for that.

The point is that when you mechanise meat production to such an extent, there will be suffering. It's the law of averages. A skilled slaughter man can act in seconds if the first stun doesn't work or whatever. He will know exactly what to do and it will be in the best interests of the animal. Machines are blind and don't care. The bird carries on down the line to the next part of the process regardless.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/23/-sp-revealed-dirty-secret-uk-poultry-industry-chicken-campylobacter

[Clansman]

youre not going to let me walk away are you Clansman- clearly the use of some amusing emoticons hasn't done the trick

No not at all! I like a good debate!

ok, we're changing direction slightly in that now we're questioning the ethics of the process rather than how its done and the welfare issues around it.

I agree with you 100%, I would love to see table chickens reared more naturally.

we could give them a lot more space, use a slower growing bird which lives longer, allow them outside etc etc

All of these improvements we make to the system would massively increase the cost of the finished bird though.

We're in a catch 22, we currently produce huge amounts of chicken to feed ourselves at a cheap price.

If we reared these birds as we'd all like to then they would become unaffordable to all but the rich.

At that point we just move to another cheaper food source, it can't be done.

I rear Scots Greys, the excess males are eaten, they aren't huge even at a year old but they do for a meal.

I'd hate to sit down and work out exactly what the meal would have cost me, a chicken eats a lot of food in a year.

At a rough guess lets be very conservative and say at least 100g per day thats almost 40Kg in a year so in food alone its cost me at least £18ish for a bird that'll be just over 3-3.5Kg live weight

Thats me doing it at home, by the time you added commercial overheads that bird becomes unaffordable, you can buy a lot of food for what it would cost you.

I do it because I can afford to take the hit on that financially but if I were unable to pay for that food then purely from a nutritional return point of view i'd be miles better off just using the food I give to these birds to make bread etc.

Maybe thats what we need to do, go back to the days when our diet was mainly vegetarian based and any meat, even chicken was a rare treat.

I rear my own turkeys, at Christmas my family all get a large turkey each.

a fresh 20lb+ 'free range' turkey for Christmas will cost you over £100, now I'm not sure many of my family would justify paying that amount of money for a turkey, I'm pretty sure most would just go without.

We're rearing birds commercially as well as we can just now to satisfy the market/price and demand, the moral dilemma of whether we should be doing it is a whole other issue.

The Campylobacter issue is a handling problem not a farm welfare issue, its a gut bacteria which somewhere along the process is being transferred to the carcass.

Campylobacter, same as Salmonella is found everywhere, your dog/cat/budgie/shoes/garden path all have it, I'm quite sure my and everybody else birds probably have it.

We looked for it and we found it, now its a problem, Salmonella was largely ignored until Mrs. Currie proclaimed all eggs were riddled with it! 

If we prepare and cook our food properly its not an issue