An article in the Sunday Herald this weekend highlights a disturbing development in the broiler chicken industry.
Journalist Rob Edwards investigated the background to an application by a broiler farm in Fife to increase its capacity from 340,000 chickens in its eleven industrial units to a massive 500,000. According to the farm, the increase was necessary to meet supermarket demands for smaller, lighter birds:
“The reason we ask to increase the number of birds from 340,000 to 500,000 is because of the way in which Agriculture are operating their business and the way in which the supermarkets are requesting lighter birds which means an increase on demand of lighter birds per farm increasing the density per m2 but not exceeding 38kg per m2.”
Most of the UK chicken industry considers that stocking chickens at a density of 38kg per m2 – that is, up to 19 birds in a metre of floor space – is acceptable in welfare terms. The level nudges the legal maximum but is permitted by the Red Tractor assurance scheme which covers over 90% of poultry. This ignores the current government code for broiler welfare, which recommends that the maximum stocking density for meat chickens should be 34 kg/ m2, not 38kg/ m2, throughout the growing period.
The code goes on to say “This stocking density is satisfactory for chickens reared to the usual slaughter weights (1.8 - 3.0 kg) but it should be reduced for birds being reared to significantly lower slaughter weights.” (our italics)
In other words, assurance schemes and supermarket standards that support rearing 19 chickens per square metre are going against existing government recommendations. Welfare-based schemes such as Freedom Food and organic standards impose a maximum stocking density of 30kg/m2 .
But here’s something else to worry about. Both DEFRA and, we assume, the Scottish Government are considering migrating the responsibility for writing the farm animal welfare codes over to industry. DEFRA trialled this for England last summer with a draft meat chickens code written by the British Poultry Council (BPC). When OneKind scrutinised the BPC draft we noted that it had removed that very passage recommending a maximum density of 34kg/m2 and a reduction for smaller birds. We objected to the change in our response – it bodes ill for broiler welfare and raises the question of whether industry can be sufficiently independent of commercial interests to write its own codes.
The Sunday Herald article quoted Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City University in London and a former government advisor, as saying that chickens have the most miserable lives on farms: “Probably no animal farmed intensively on earth has a shorter, more captive or controlled life than the broiler chicken,” he said.
We agree. One would think, however, that during their brief, controlled lives the least we could give them would be a little space.