The global chicken deal

 
The Guardian
7-14-15
Will the worst bird flu outbreak in US history finally make us reconsider factory farming chicken?
The outbreak has required that farmers resort to fire-extinguisher foam to kill off infected flocks. Can commercial farms protect themselves, or is US chicken farming fundamentally unsustainable?
Laura Entis

http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jul/14/bird-flu-devastation-...

The avian flu outbreak that has more than doubled egg prices across the country has also led to the death of more than 48 million birds in a dozen states, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Iowa, the hardest hit, has euthanized more than 31 million birds, including approximately 40% of the state’s 60 million laying hens, according to Randy Olson, executive director of the Iowa Poultry Association. Turkey farmers in the state, while affected to a lesser degree, also have suffered. Minnesota, the leading turkey producer, has lost nearly 9 million turkeys.
The massive challenge of disposing of these sick birds illustrates the scale of chicken farming in the US. When avian flu infects a single bird on a chicken farm, the whole population has to be destroyed in order to stop the spread. In Iowa, for example, where an egg farm holds anywhere from 70,000 to 5 million birds, infection means slaughtering an unimaginable number of animals.
“It’s reasonable when we see these outbreaks to wonder if they are a manifestation of the unsustainability of the system,” says Suzanne McMillan, senior director of the farm and animal welfare campaign at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). “Bird flu is a window into how today’s poultry flocks live day to day, in intensive confinement and unsanitary conditions. It’s an unnatural, unsustainable situation.”
When an infected bird is detected on a farm, it is immediately quarantined and the USDA works in conjunction with the farmer to determine the best method for disposing of the exposed flock. “It is important to realize that each [avian influenza] outbreak incident is unique and involves site specific conditions that need to be considered in making the best disposal decision for the situation at the site,” reads a 2006 paper by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The reality is often much more emotional than that language might imply. “These farmers spend their entire careers caring for their animals and to see the disease affect their flocks … is an emotionally devastating event,” Olson says.
Meanwhile for turkeys and broiler chickens, which are floor-reared (ie not kept in cages), the use of water-based foam similar to that used by firefighters is the most effective way to euthanize a large flock in a short period of time, says Beth Carlson, North Dakota’s deputy state veterinarian.
Approved for use by the USDA in 2006, the water-based foam suffocates the birds, which are typically herded into an enclosed area of the barn so that the foam can be deployed more quickly.
The foam’s active ingredient, propylene glycol, breaks down “relatively quickly (within several days to a week) in surface water and in soil”, according to the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease. The foaming agent, lauryl alcohol, is acutely toxic to marine animals, but has been deemed harmless to human health.
The administration of the foam – either by nozzle or, more commonly for commercial farms, a foam generator – is a rolling process, meaning workers apply foam to birds at one end of the house, and then work their way, contained area by contained area, to the opposite end.
The foam needs to be six to 10 inches higher than the birds in order to suffocate them. Pumping in enough foam to cover their heads can take up to an hour.
“Individual birds are only exposed for a matter of seconds,” says Dr Eric Benson, a professor in the University of Delaware’s animal and food sciences department, who co-authored a paper on mass euthanasia methods for poultry. He says animals typically die within a minute.
In April, two turkey farms in North Dakota were infected and more than 100,000 birds euthanized as a result. Both farms used water-based foam.
 “Euthanasia is never a pleasant thing to have to do,” Carlson says. But foam “is fast and minimally stressful for the birds, which means it’s less stressful for the people involved”.
Not all agree that using foam is humane. “We could do better,” says Michael Blackwell, chief veterinary officer at The Humane Society of the United States, who likens death by foam to “cuffing a person’s mouth and nose, during which time you are very much aware that your breathing has been precluded”.
Unlike Benson, he estimated that average death takes between three and seven minutes: “For any animal, that would be distressing.”
For floor-reared flocks, euthanasia by water-based foam is the cheapest and most efficient method available, as open-air barns do not need to be covered and the application requires fewer people to administer. And yet, says Blackwell, it is possible for farmers to use more humane alternatives by tarping floor-reared animals and administering inert gases, such as nitrogen and argon, which cause the birds to drift off, as if going to sleep.
Based on the size of the flock and local conditions, the dead birds are composted on-site (either indoors or outdoors), composted off-site, buried, moved to landfills or incinerated. Composting – in which dead birds are laid in rows, mixed with a bulking agent such as wood chips or saw dust and then left for approximately 30 days – is the preferred method of disposal, Benson says, because the virus is killed by the heat produced as the birds decompose. The problem with landfills, according to Benson, is that the virus might contaminate the soil or groundwater.
From backyard birds to commercial flocks
The avian influenza outbreak, which originated from the droppings of waterfowl carrying the virus, is showing signs of tapering off as temperatures continue to rise across the country. The virus is weakened by warm, dry conditions.
“The number of infections has certainly slowed in Iowa,” Olson says. “We are hopeful that this current outbreak is near its end.”
However, experts predict that the virus will return in the fall, when cooler, damp weather provides favorable conditions for its spread, and as ducks and other waterfowl complete reverse migration patterns.
While a report from the USDA, which investigated 80 commercial poultry farms, “cannot at present point to a single statistically significant pathway” for the spread of the outbreak, it determined that “a likely cause of some virus transmission is insufficient application of recommended biosecurity practices”.
The USDA report went on to recommend that all equipment and vehicles, as well as workers’ clothing, be disinfected before moving between farms.
“We need to learn lessons from this outbreak and modify biosecurity practices to minimize future outbreaks,” says Olson, citing a lack of consistency in the industry when it comes to auditing avian health hazards, as well as a need for more comprehensive guidelines for vehicle disinfection, as areas that require stricter standards. “This disease does not discriminate. We’ve seen it in backyard flocks; we’ve seen it in wild birds; we’ve seen it all types of commercial housing.”
Hon S Ip, a virologist at the US Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, disagrees with this assessment. During the initial outbreak starting in December, the disease was detected mainly in wild flocks in the Pacific Flyaway, a bird migration path from Alaska to Patagonia. But “in the Midwest there have been more commercial flocks infected than backyard flocks,” he says.
An ‘unsustainable system’
This is likely, at least in part, because sunshine and warm backyard temperatures are effective at killing the virus, says Dr Michael Greger, director of public health and animal agriculture for the Humane Society of the United States.
Commercial poultry farms, on the other hand, “are designed like a disease incubator”, thanks to dark, moist and crowded conditions.
While factory poultry are more isolated, “when infected, [factory-farmed birds] are subject to wildfire-like outbreaks”, says Michael Davis, author of The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu.
On top of that, the genetic makeup of birds found in factory farms is often less diverse than those raised in backyard flocks. Due to the industry’s reliance on homogenous breeding techniques, commercially raised broilers are all pretty much genetically identical. Broilers and turkeys are artificially selected and bred to produce birds that grow quickly – at a rate 300% faster than those birds raised in 1960, according to the ASPCA – and produce as much breast protein as possible, to the point where the birds have a hard time standing upright.
Not only do commercial flocks share a limited gene pool, but some studies have suggested the industry’s vise-like focus on breast meat, in the case of broilers and turkeys, and eggs, in the case of hens, suppresses the birds’ immune systems, atheory known as resource allocation.
When a bird is bred so that all its energy goes to the production of meat or eggs, “something has to give”, says the ASPCA’s McMillan. “The science indicates that a bird’s immunity goes down.”
As Greger puts it: “There is an inverse relationship between accelerated growth and disease resistance, which means faster-growing birds are more susceptible to illness.”
While the USDA terms this outbreak “a wake-up call on biosecurity”, the idea of hermetically sealing farms, which use ventilation fans to keep birds cool, may be too difficult to enforce. “The industrial poultry system, by its very nature, is vulnerable to these kinds of infections,” he says.
It’s the system that is at fault, according to McMillan. “We are forcing birds to live in unbalanced ways, both physically and genetically,”she says. Commercial poultry flocks “are bred to suffer. We force them to live a life of misery, and from that perspective, they are going to be more prone to contracting and spreading disease. These are not healthy, balanced animals.”
 
5-19-15
Faeces, bacteria, toxins: welcome to the chicken farm
Whether it's welfare standards, environmental impact or the emerging threat to human health, we've got to change our insatiable greed for this meat.
 
 ‘Is it too much to ask that we should eat meat as our grandparents did, as ­something special, rather than as ­something we happen to be stuffing into our faces while reading our emails?’

 
George Monbiot
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/19/chicken-welfare-hum...
It’s the insouciance that baffles me. To participate in the killing of an animal: this is a significant decision. It spreads like a fungal mycelium into the heartwood of our lives. Yet many people eat meat sometimes two or three times a day, casually and hurriedly, often without even marking the fact.
I don’t mean to blame. Billions are spent, through advertising and marketing, to distract and mollify, to trivialise the weighty decisions we make, to ensure that we don’t connect. Even as we search for meaning and purpose, we want to be told that our actions are inconsequential. We seek reassurance that we are significant, but that what we do is not.
It’s not blind spots we suffer from. We have vision spots, tiny illuminated patches of perception, around which everything else is blanked out. How often have I seen environmentalists gather to bemoan the state of the world, then repair to a restaurant in which they gorge on beef or salmon? The Guardian and Observer urge us to go green, then publish recipes for fish whose capture rips apart the life of the sea.
The television chefs who bravely sought to break this spell might have been talking to the furniture. Giant chicken factories are springing up throughout the west of England, the Welsh marches and the lowlands of the east. I say factories for this is what they are: you would picture something quite different if I said farm; they are hellish places. You might retch if you entered one – yet you eat what they produce without thinking.
 
 Giant chicken factories are springing up throughout the west of England, the Welsh marches and the lowlands of the east.

Two giant broiler units are now being planned to sit at the head of the Golden Valley in Herefordshire, one of the most gorgeous landscapes in Britain. Each shed at Bage Court Farm – warehouses 90 metres long – is likely to house about 40,000 birds that will be cleared out, killed and replaced every 40 days or so. The UK now has some 2,000 chicken factories, to meet a demand for the meat that has doubled in 40 years.
I don’t know how these units will operate, but factories elsewhere inflict noise and dust and stench and traffic on quiet corners of the country. Because everything is automated, they employ few people, and those in hideous jobs: picking up and binning the birds that drop dead every day, catching chickens for slaughter in a flurry of excrement and feathers, then scraping out the warehouses before the next batch arrives.
The dust such operations raises is anexquisite compound of aerialised faeces, chicken dander (dead skin), mites, bacteria, fungal spores, mycotoxins, endotoxins, veterinary medicines, pesticides, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide. It is listed as a substance hazardous to health, and helps explain why 15% of poultry workers suffer from chronic bronchitis.
Yet, uniquely in Europe, the British government classifies unfiltered roof vents on poultry sheds as the “best available technology”. If this were any other industry, it would be obliged to build a factory chimney to disperse the dust and the stink. But farming, as ever, is protected by deference and vested interest, excluded from the regulations, planning conditions and taxes other businesses must observe. Already, Herefordshire county council has approved chicken factories close to schools, without surveying the likely extent of the dust plumes before or after the business opens. Bage Court Farm is just up-wind of the village of Dorstone.
Inside chicken factories are scenes of cruelty practised on such a scale that they almost lose their ability to shock. Bred to grow at phenomenal speed, many birds collapse under their own weight and lie in the ammoniacal litter, acquiring burns on their feet and legs and lesions on their breasts. After slaughter they are graded. Those classified as grade A can be sold whole. The others must have parts of the body removed, as they are disfigured by bruising, burning and necrosis. The remaining sections are cut up and sold as portions. Hungry yet?
Plagues spread fast through such factories, so broiler businesses often dose their birds with antibiotics. These require prescriptions but – amazingly – thegovernment keeps no record of how many are issued. The profligate use of antibiotics on farms endangers human health, as it makes bacterial resistance more likely.
 
Nor does free range solve the feed problem: the birds are usually fed on soya, for which rainforests are wrecked

But Herefordshire, like other county councils in the region, scarcely seems to care. How many broiler units has it approved? Who knows? Searches by local people suggest 42 in the past 12 months. But in December the council claimed it has authorised 21 developments since 2000. This week it told me it has granted permission to 31 since 2010. It admits that it “has not produced any specific strategy for managing broiler unit development”. Nor has it assessed the cumulative impact of these factories. At Bage Court Farm, as elsewhere, the council has decided that no environmental impact assessment is needed.
 
So how should chicken be produced? The obvious answer is free range, but this exchanges one set of problems for another. Chicken dung is rich in soluble reactive phosphate. Large outdoor flocks lay down a scorching carpet of droppings, from which phosphate can leach or flash-flood into the nearest stream.
Rivers such as the Ithon, in Powys, are said to run white with chicken excrement after rainstorms. The River Wye, a special area of conservation, is blighted by algal blooms: manure stimulates the growth of green murks and slimes that kill fish and insects when they rot. Nor does free range solve the feed problem: the birds are usually fed on soya, for which rainforests and cerrado on the other side of the world are wrecked.
 
There is no sensible way of producing the amount of chicken we eat. Reducing the impact means eating less meat – much less. I know that most people are not prepared to stop altogether. But is it too much to ask that we should eat meat as our grandparents did, as something rare and special, rather than as something we happen to be stuffing into our faces while reading our emails? To recognise that an animal has been sacrificed to serve our appetites, to observe the fact of its death: is this not the least we owe it?

 
Knowing what we do and what we induce others to do is a prerequisite for a life that is honest and meaningful. We owe something to ourselves as well: to overcome our disavowal, and connect.