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May 11th, 2013 
Peter Nolan
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It is a crisp Autumn day and I join about 10 others on a bus in Melbourne for a media tour of a chicken meat farm in regional Victoria.
The chicken meat industry is one that has undergone enormous growth but it has also had plenty of bad publicity and has been the target of animal rights activists, who say it is the biggest animal welfare problem in Australia.
The trip to Hazeldene’s Farm is being hosted by the Australian Chicken Meat Federation.
The federation has two full-time staff representing farms and processors in the $2.1 billion chicken meat industry.
The federation’s chief executive Andreas Dubs says the industry faces a lot of misconceptions.
“A lot of people come to us with completely the wrong ideas, they still believe that we use cages, and we use hormones to make the chickens grow faster,” he said.
“So it’s really to open up the doors in a small way to a group of people who can then carry out the message that we don’t do these things, we don’t use cages, we don’t use hormones, we actually have a sophisticated system to produce the chicken meat that is obviously becoming very, very popular.”
Australia has an insatiable appetite for chicken.
As the consumption of red meat goes down, chicken is going up.
It is estimated each Australian eats 44 kilograms of chicken a year, with 90 per cent of us eating chicken meat at least once a week.
Industry projections show Australian consumption will be 45 kilograms per person by 2015.
There are 500 million birds being processed in Australia each year.
But the industry is not without its challenges.
A growing consumer demand for birds that are treated humanely has seen the industry adapt to new practises, but it has been caught out too.
In 2011, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission began proceedings in the Federal Court over the use of the term ‘Free to Roam’. The action was brought against the Chicken Meat Federation and two companies.
The industry has already abandoned the use of the term ‘Free to Roam’.
Glenys Oogjes from Animals Australia says the result of the court case is still important.
“The decision I’m quite sure, I can’t pre-empt it but I’m quite sure it will give a warning to all producers, chicken producers, other animal production industries, that they can’t mislead consumers so blatantly. We still do think that there’s huge education to be done by letting people see the way animals are actually treated in this system,” she said.
Hazeldene’s itself is a huge operation.
There are 16 sheds and a network of roads. The family-run business employs 700 staff and 150 contractors.
Each shed houses some 45,000 chicks, reared in that same location until they are ready for slaughter.
Typically, 110,000 birds are slaughtered here each day.
They are killed anywhere from the age of 32 days to 50 days, depending on the size of the chicken required to fulfil orders.
John Hazeldene is the company’s managing director and says the problem is his industry is seen as secretive.
He says the reason it is secretive is because of the important bio-security issues that need to be addressed.
“We want to improve the image of the industry and we’re also proud of what we have here and it’s a way of showcasing our business and also showcasing the industry,” he said.
“I really believe the industry is all working the same way as we are and we want to dispel the myths.
“We haven’t got anything to hide, but that doesn’t mean we can be open to every group that wants to come through, but as you can see today we’re not hiding anything, and there’s nothing there for anyone to worry about.”
Mr Hazeldene says while there is more consumer interest in animal welfare, many people still do no want to pay too much for their chicken.
There are three types of chicken produced on the farm – conventional, RSPCA and free range.
RSPCA chickens are still in sheds full-time but they sheds are less crowded.
“The consumer, to buy free range or to buy RSPCA, they must pay a premium because it costs us a lot more money to rear them, for instance to build a shed would probably be 30 per cent more expensive if we were doing it all with RSPCA because we simply put less birds in the shed, so it’s a cost thing,” he said.
“The market will head towards that, we really see the ramping up of animal welfare and we agree with it, we’re passionate about it, but you can’t force people to buy a higher welfare bird if they’ve only got a certain amount of dollars to spend.
“We’re running at about 25 per cent RSPCA accredited chickens now, and I can quite easily see it will be 50 per cent in five years.”
The machinery in Hazeldene’s processing plant is world class and only around a year old.
But it is still surprising how much of the work is done by hand.
Boners arrive each day from Melbourne on buses. They work independently, slicing breasts from the chickens and they are paid by the weight of what they produce.
There are two shifts for the workers at the processing plant, one that begins at 2:00am and the next at 10:00am.
Seeing the processing plant in action is a stark reminder of the enormous demand for chicken. Not just whole chickens, but chicken pieces, kebabs and schnitzels.
In all, Hazeldene’s supplies more than 600 lines of chicken to the major supermarkets, Aldi, smaller grocers and take-away shops.
Still, there is no doubt some members of the public would find aspects of the industry unpalatable.
The enormous sheds are clean, but they do not have any natural light. As the chickens grow bigger, there is less room for them to move.
Their lives are short, with chickens removed in batches from the shed from 32 days, with the right size picked in order to fulfil orders.
It is a clinical operation run to precision.
The chicken meat industry’s main advantage over other meats is the cost of production. It takes 3.4 kilograms of feed to produce a bird that weights just over two kilograms and is ready for market.
It takes a lot more feed to produce a kilogram of beef and pork.
The industry has its own code of practice that allows chickens to be stocked in sheds at 40 kilograms per square metre.
The ACMF says in reality, most farms stock well below that.
The RSPCA-approved stocking rate is about 30 per cent lower and includes requirements for perches and other enrichment activities such as soccer balls to move around and hanging CDs for the birds to peck at.
Glenys Oogjes from Animals Australia says the RSPCA measures still do not go far enough. She says factory farming in Australia should stop.
“We welcome any change, any increment, but unfortunately it’s still factory farming, it’s kept at very high densities in the sheds, they never see outside, the only day of their lives they see the outside world in most of these places will be the day that they go to slaughter, and that’s only about five weeks after they’re born,” she said.
“They’re really young birds, they still cheep, they still have soft downy feathers, and that is the fate of these broiler birds, these meat chickens and it’s quite terrible.”
Topics:
animal-welfare,
rural,
sustainable-and-alternative-farming,
australia
Source Article from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-11/where-does-your-chicken-come-from3f/4682700
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