Is it time to import, asks Andrew Livingston, as welfare standards force British chicken farmers to cut stocking density
It was only in April of this year that I wrote in the BV of the mounting pressure for legislation to change the stocking density of chickens on British farms (See Cluckonomics here – possibly one of my finest headlines – Ed).
Since then it’s all changed. Interestingly, however, it wasn’t led by the government. It is the supermarkets who have changed the game.
Just to recap: as it stands at the moment, the law states that you can have a maximum of 38kgs of chickens per square metre in a housing unit. However, the majority of the main poultry producers in the country are only stocking their shed to 30kgs per square metre.
It’s pretty boring maths, but it has huge ramifications for the amount of chicken that we can produce in this country. The move from 38kg to 30kg is a reduction of around 20 per cent – so that’s around a fifth of the poultry grown in this country gone from the market.
As a nation we aren’t eating less chicken, so where is it going to come from?
The simple answer is to just build a fifth more chicken sheds to grow the birds in. But it is nigh on impossible to get planning permission for poultry housing, due to the perceived effect of the environmental damage that growing the birds causes (a debate for another column, I’m afraid).
So, perhaps we should bin off eating 20 per cent of our chicken dinners? Nice idea, but not going to happen. To me, poultry is the fastest and most efficient meat to provide protein. The only meat that is more efficient is insects (I wrote about bugs as food back in 2021 here!), but I still don’t think we are ready to stomach it!
The real answer? Imports.
We can’t do it
I attended the Poultry Meat Conference at the beginning of September (yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a conference where we all sit around and talk about poultry meat), and the 30kgs number was the big talking point. Everyone had an opinion to share.
Around 200 of us were sitting in a swanky hotel, waiting for the first speaker, when the chairman of the event – who happens to also run one of the largest producers of chicken in the country – told the room: ‘As an industry, we now can’t be afraid to import chicken.’
I thought it odd that a poultry producer would want to encourage poultry producers from across the world to get an invite into our market and trade …. as the saying goes, it’s a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas! He suggested that the UK should import the chicken for all of our frozen breaded chicken needs. At first, I hated it: ‘My kids aren’t eating Polish chicken nuggets!’ I thought (but thankfully didn’t scream out mid-conference).
But then I realised.
I had finally given up the dream.
As a nation, we can’t have the highest welfare standards for our animals, be completely carbon neutral and have huge forests and estates that are left for nature and biodiversity, while trying to be self-sufficient.
We simply can’t do it all.
We are too densely populated.
So I concede – start importing the meat. But let’s make sure we leave the best bits to be farmed here in Britain. I don’t need to have lamb chops from New Zealand, but, if you want to mince up their rubbish meat, then maybe I’ll squish some on a stick in the summer and do some Kiwi lamb koftas. Then, in a few years time, once the technology has taken another leap forward and food becomes more efficient to make, we’ll be food secure and self-sufficient and we can tell the foreign muck to go home. Either that or we’ll all be eating British grasshopper kebabs.
