By Charles Bourns, broiler grower, Gloucestershire
This month I have been out and about with my new job seeing how some deal with their dead stock collections and have seen that some have a good system and others not. We at home freeze ours and then they are transferred into a clean bin just before collection.
The system I saw in Northern Ireland was the farmer takes his bins to a collection point away from the chicken houses; the collector empties the bins into his lorry and then washes the bins out and puts the wash water into the lorry, therefore leaving clean bins to go back onto the farm.
At a time when biosecurity is becoming more and more important, do we think enough about getting rid of fallen stock? Luckily it is not too big a problem in the poultry industry unlike the fish industry which suffers up to 25% mortality. Some are apparently complaining, as a derogation that allowed them to bury dead fish in the beach is being removed!
Another organisation I am involved with is the Fishmongers and Poulters Institute. I have written before about how the institute gives out grants to help people who have worked or are working in the industry to get through a difficult time and whilst grants are given out to people in the fishing industry it appears there is nobody in the poultry industry who applies. Please give it some thought just in case there is someone who is missing out. The Worshipful Company of Poulters puts money in each year for this purpose.
We have a new MP at home, thank goodness. The last one had no interest in farming and I have written to her and invited her out onto the farm. Let’s hope she accepts the invitation.
The farm is going well doing the Oakham Gold Chicken. I am still worried however that unless the consumer will pay more, we will once again be undervaluing chicken. One aspect of the move to lower stocking density that I don’t think will be as big a problem as we feared is space. It would appear that with the conversion of old turkey sheds and refurbishment of old chicken houses we may not be 20% short of space as has been widely reported.
I do think though we need to properly promote ourselves. Look at what the egg industry does with initiatives like World Egg Day when 45 countries ran promotions for eggs on the same day telling the consumer why they should value and eat eggs. It was all co-ordinated by the International Egg Commission an organisation started some 40 years ago.
There is an International Poultry Council but they do not seem to run a similar campaign for poultrymeat. They organise meetings of all the large poultry companies (but not farmers) which might explain the different attitude to promotion of the product.