By Charles Bourns, broiler grower, GloucestershireÂ
It has been an interesting month as I attended the City Food Lecture and the NFU AGM . The City Food Lecture was about whether our diets will be better in 25 years’ time. My feeling is that the whole food debate on all aspects – whether it be production systems or products produced is too much driven by NGOs and people who live in the more affluent parts of the country (or should I say effluent?!)
Which leads me onto the NFU AGM where I met a person who works for one of t the companies that have said they are not going to adopt the BCC standards. This is for several reasons: one no-one has persuaded his company that the chicken see any welfare benefit between the 30kg and 38kg and now the industry have by and large dropped the slower growing breed, he believes stockmanship and not systems create welfare, which has always been my opinion. Secondly the industry has not made sure the customer knows about the BCC system and how it benefits them. Lastly, he had concerns on supply if his supply base dropped to 30kg, even though they are thinning some twice.
This is why I was pleased to hear that the NFU are promoting British chicken and its benefits for a week at the end of May from the 25 to the 31. Let’s trust it is successful and it will lead onto many more weeks. You all know my opinion on promotion. It is essential if we are to keep foreign imports from taking a bigger and bigger share of our market, for as long as they can come in it takes the pressure off the Government and retailers to really get behind the building of new facilities, and not just farms, but  hatcheries, processing plants and everything in between.
At the breakout session we had a group of interesting speakers and it was particularly good to have Birthe Steenberg from AVEC speaking. AVEC has six people in their office, while the Eurogroup for Animal Welfare has 62, so she told us if they hear of a meeting they are attending, they turn up (invited or not) to make sure the industry’s point of view is heard. Maybe here we are sometimes too polite.
At home we have vaccinated the chicken at four days for cocci and taken the coccidiostat out of the feed. This is the first time I have done this in 40 years so let’s hope it was a good decision as my son was away at the time. I am also told this reduces our costs by about 2p per bird; we will have to wait and see.
I will sign off now and take the dogs out as there is a funny yellow disc in the sky.