by frog
Probably because its broiler shed was already full and the rapidly growing poultry industry was building a new shed.
Chicken has gone from a relatively rare and unusual meat (under 1kg per capita in the 1960′s) to the most consumed meat in New Zealand. The Poultry Industry Association of New Zealand says we kiwis consumed nearly 90 million chickens in 2005, or 38.8 kg per person. If a chicken Happy Meal were actually all chicken that would be about 6 McNuggets every day for each child.
According to this PIANZ report [pdf] Tegel Foods Ltd, Inghams Enterprises (NZ) Pty Ltd, and PH van den Brink Ltd dominate the industry with about 97% of production.
Pressure on those producers to keep costs low comes from our supermarket duopoly (Foodstuffs and Progressive) which controls about half the market for chicken in New Zealand. The other large chicken purchasers are mostly takeaway firms, particularly KFC, but also McDonalds Subway and Burger King and others.
As the PIANZ report notes:
There is a high level of vertical integration within this industry with the three major suppliers owning and controlling more of the stages of production, from hatcheries and breeding farms to feed mills, processing plants and distribution to the retail outlets.
… Nevertheless the major companies contract out the growing of broiler chickens to contract growers whilst still retaining ownership of the chickens.
All of which means that the industry has the capacity, the outside pressure and the desire to keep costs as low as possible. Which doesn’t bode well for the ever increasing number of chickens.
PIANZ says:
New Zealand broiler (meat) chickens are not kept in cages. They are free to roam around inside the barn, where they have free access to feed and water.
It also says that an average NZ chicken shed of 150 metres by 15 metres houses 40,000 chickens – that’s 18 per square metre, even before you put anything else in the shed such as ‘access to feed and water’.
SAFE describes these chickens’ lives less obscurely:
91.9 percent of New Zealand’s broiler chickens cannot walk normally…
Broiler chickens are crammed inside large sheds at 20 birds per square metre. They suffer from various degrees of leg weakness, skin abrasion and dermatitis and can not express their normal behaviour. They spend their short lives standing in their own faeces and will never see experience daylight or anything that resembles a normal life.
All broilers are routinely fed antibiotics for their entire lives. This prevents widespread outbreak of disease that otherwise would be unavoidable in these overcrowded conditions. Antibiotics also promote growth and exacerbate the already unnatural fast growth of the animals.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Tue, February 19th, 2008
Tags: Antibiotics, Broiler, chickens, Food, Inghams Enterprises, Poultry Industry Association of New Zealand, SAFE, Tegel
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
I’m just reading the Omivore’s Dilemma, and it turns out that even free-range with ‘access’ to outside may be too conditioned by their barn life to ever take the option in the last two weeks of their 7 week lives.
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Yeah I’m very cynical about what egg-cartons mean when they say ‘barn raised’. I thought maybe it was cages that were in a ‘barn’, but what this post says clears things up a bit.
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And would you like Campylobacter with that, sir?
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Thank you, no, but now that I think of it, egg laying hens wouldnt be walking around in a barn…
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egg laying hens can walk around in barns, though they tend to stop walking around when they lay an egg. Until a few decades ago, most hens laid eggs in barns that they were free to walk around in.
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