By Richard Griffiths, chief executive, British Poultry Council
For most of us in the poultry industry, our day probably doesn’t start with big ideas. It starts with something more like: who’s off, what’s gone up in price, and how you’re going to get through the day.
Most of the time, each problem on its own is manageable. Not easy, but manageable. You deal with it, adjust, and move on. That’s what this sector does better than most, it gets on with it. Recently it doesn’t feel like one problem at a time, it feels like everything, all at once. Labour is tight, and skills are harder to find. Costs don’t sit still long enough to plan around, and standards keep changing. Disease risk isn’t something that comes and goes anymore, it just sits there in the background.
Any one of those, you’d take on. All of them together starts to feel different.
Struggle to find people, and the team you have stretches thinner and that’s where productivity dips or mistakes creep in. That all feeds into costs, which go up, but prices don’t always follow. Margins tighten, investment gets pushed back, and nothing really improves. The same goes for disease. You can do everything right on your own site and still feel exposed, because it’s not just about you.
The instinct, quite rightly, is to fix what’s in front of you. Find the staff. Cut the cost. Meet the new requirement. That’s what keeps the business moving, but if that’s all we do, the same problems keep coming back. If the same problems keep coming back then they’re probably not the problems we should be solving.
Let’s be honest and recognise that these aren’t just separate issues anymore. They’re signs of a system under pressure.
That’s what people mean when they talk about resilience. Not another layer of paperwork or a slogan to put on a slide, but something much more practical.
Can the system keep going when it’s under strain?
Can it take a hit without everything seizing up?
Can it adapt without making life harder every year?
None of this means you need to think about global policy while you’re trying to run a site. But it does mean the problems you’re dealing with aren’t just yours, and the fixes won’t be either. Some things get sorted locally. Some need national direction. Some only make sense if they’re tackled together across countries.
If the list of problems keeps getting longer, it’s probably time to stop treating them one by one, and start seeing the bigger picture they’re pointing to.