Is intensive farming cruel to poultry? Does free-range really taste better? Ronan McGreevyvisits some chicken houses to find out
When the end comes for the poor chicken, it comes quickly. After arriving at the huge Manor Farm plant in Shercock, Co Cavan, they are hung by their legs on a conveyor belt which is bathed in blue light to keep them calm.
Seven seconds later, they are dead, electrocuted in a bath of water. After a split second they emerge and their heads are cut off. As they bleed for seven minutes, they are stripped of their feathers in a steam bath, disembowelled in the presence of a Department of Agriculture vet who checks for diseases, and then chilled along a conveyor belt that stretches the equivalent of four and a half kilometres to the factory floor.
A computer checks the chicken carcasses for bruising, which might give clues to bad husbandry, and drops them off at the correct weight station.
The bigger birds are packaged for the supermarkets; the others are cut up into chicken pieces. Nothing is wasted. The feet go to China, the intestines to the Turkish community in Germany, the legs to eastern Europe, the wings to Spain and the bones to soup-makers in Holland. The rest is packaged for the Irish and British markets.
The process is not pretty, but it is awesomely efficient. The Shercock factory is capable of killing 10,000 birds an hour.
The poultry industry in the UK is reeling from a concerted campaign by two of its best-known chefs, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Their Chicken Out campaign wants an end to intensively-reared chickens and their replacement by free-range chickens that are reared partially outdoors and for a longer time.
They believe it is cruel to keep chickens in cramped conditions and then to slaughter them after just 34 days. They also maintain that free-range chickens taste better because they have been reared longer, and argue that the farmers themselves are the victims of the cut-price poultry war engaged in by the supermarkets.
Their campaign, which has been garnering a fierce wind of publicity, has put the poultry industry in Britain on the defensive. Here, Vincent Carton, managing director of the Republic's largest poultry producer, Manor Farm, has decided instead to go on the attack. He says the industry in Ireland has nothing to hide, and is happy for The Irish Timesto view every aspect of the process of rearing and slaughtering chickens.
The eighth generation of his family to go into the poultry business, Carton says the UK campaign is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the different birds. The Ross and Cobb birds, which are the most common breeds of standard chicken, are based on jungle fowl. They like heat and light, and grow very quickly. The Hubbard bird, favoured by free-range producers, grows more slowly and is suited to outdoor conditions.
Carton claims there are no welfare issues in relation to Irish chickens, which are monitored by law by the Department of Agriculture, Bord Bia and the Environmental Protection Agency.
"We're not just happy with the way we rear our chickens, we're very proud," he says. Instead, he believes, the problem is with imported chicken, which constitute almost 60 per cent of the 3.2 million birds eaten by Irish people every week.
"I have no problem with competition. I want a level playing field," he says. "I want to make sure the consumer knows where it is coming from, what the standards are - and freshness is extremely important, and we are being duped at the moment."
FARMERS GET AN average of 35 cent for every standard chicken and 60 cent for free-range birds from producers who pay for the chicks, feed and transportation to the factory, according to Ned Morrissey, the chairman of the Irish Farmers' Association's poultry committee and himself a farmer with 60,000 chickens. He says it costs producers an extra €1 in feed for each free-range bird, but the mark-up in the supermarket is substantially more. "We're just covering our costs," he says
The issue of taste and not animal welfare was the one exercising the celebrity chef, Richard Corrigan, when he went on radio last year and condemned Irish standard chicken as "muck and crap".
"The biggest mistake I made was mentioning the word 'Irish'," he says. "All industrial-farmed chicken to me is muck and crap. The consumer knows it and so does the producer. You can't hold back the floodgates. When it comes to consumer choice, it's clear that the consumer is making a big choice in Ireland at the present time because the free-range poultry sales are up."
Corrigan believes that standard chickens don't taste right because they are not reared long enough. In his restaurants, he uses only organic chickens that have been reared for 80 days.
Taste, though, is problematic. For the record, during a blind tasting at Manor Farm, the photographer and I both guessed the free range from the standard chicken. I noticed a marked difference, but shoppers in Castleblayney tested by RTÉ's Ear to the Groundprogramme, which is being broadcast next week, did not. Forty per cent preferred the corn-fed variety, 20 per cent tasted no difference, and the preference for organic, free-range and standard chicken was evenly divided at 13 per cent. "I'm not surprised. Chicken is chicken for most Irish people," said producer Una Shinners.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) has written to the British supermarkets asking them to take standard chicken off their shelves. Its Irish equivalent, the ISPCA, says it is ultimately a matter of consumer choice.
"It is easy to preach from an ivory tower, but if a person on a tight budget has a choice between a €5 and a €28 bird, it is not rocket science to see which one they will pick," says Mark Beazley, general manager of the ISPCA. "The Eurobarometer [EU public opinion monitor] has shown that customers across the EU are more comfortable eating animal products that reflect welfare standards. The point is to educate the public so that those who can afford to make the choice choose free-range."
IT IS A cold and wet January day at John McKeogh's chicken house in Lisiniskey, near Castleblayney in Co Monaghan, the type of day that you wouldn't put a dog out in, as they say in country parts.
Chickens like warmth, but even today hundreds have straggled on to the grass outside. The most striking thing about McKeogh's free-range chickens is their size. The comb that marks the cocks out from the pullets (female birds) is more pronounced and they have a more strident strut than the standard birds. They are also significantly bigger than their standard equivalent, though, with a bigger frame, there is not a lot more meat on them by the time they arrive at the supermarket and the customer would be hard-pressed to tell the difference without labelling.
The stocking density in McKeogh's chicken house is considerably smaller. He has 14,000 chickens at a time. A standard chicken house would have at least 33 per cent more birds.
McKeogh's birds are reared for 56 days before being slaughtered, a time period specified by the EU.
He was a pioneer when he first got into free-range chickens 10 years ago, one of only five such farmers in the north-east. He maintains that it was partially a business decision - seeing a gap in the market - and partially a matter of animal welfare.
"I do think they are very happy. They have got room outside and they're better chickens for that," he says.
McKeogh's prescience was rewarded last year when he doubled his flock from 7,000 to 14,000, and also doubled the size of his chicken house to meet the burgeoning demand for free-range chicken.
He has ambivalent feelings about the British campaign fronted by Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. "I'm happy that are promoting free-range chickens, but I'm not happy they are trying to harm the overall industry," he says.
MEANWHILE, A BLIZZARD of feathers awaits visitors to Malcolm Frazer's two chicken houses in Mullinacross, near Kingscourt in Co Cavan. There are chickens as far as the eye can see, and even further. A week before they are due for the slaughterhouse, these chickens have sufficient, if not ample, room to move.
Frazer has 44,000 chickens, evenly divided between two chicken houses. The chicken houses themselves are split between pullets (58 per cent) and cocks (48 per cent). The pullets are sent for slaughter after 34 days and usually end up as chicken pieces; the cocks, which are bigger, follow them after about 42 days and usually end up as the Sunday roast.
Frazer, whose father was also a chicken farmer, sends five batches of chicken to the slaughterhouse every year.
The chickens arrive as chicks. They wander on to scales that are dotted around the chicken house and the aggregate weight is sent by text message to the slaughterhouse, where it is monitored to ensure the general health of the flock.
After they are sent to the factory, the chicken house is cleaned out and power-hosed, a process that takes a week. Fresh wood shavings are put down for another batch of chickens and the whole process begins again.
Frazer says the portrayal of intensive chicken farming as outlined in the Channel 4 programme, Chicken Run, is unfair because Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall made a number of fundamental mistakes in his own experiment, most notably putting down straw on a wet floor, which led to the hock burns on the bird's legs. He also says that the ventilation, a critical part of an intensive chicken farm, was inadequate in the farm in the programme, causing a strong stench of ammonia which is largely absent in his own chicken houses.
Frazer is bemused by suggestions that intensively-reared chickens are treated cruelly. "My chickens are happy enough. They have enough to eat and drink, and they're warm. Even if they could go outside, most of them would prefer to stay indoors. What more do they need?"
