Part
3 - Advanced technology
Currently
there has been little demand to stop the growth of intensive farms
and move to organic farming, said Richard Griffiths, chief executive
of the British Poultry Council. He said organic farms would take up
much more space “If we tried to grow a billion birds a year,
that would be a lot of land It’s a balancing act and it’s demand
driven.”
“Intensive
farms maintain high environmental, hygiene and welfare standards when
they are run properly these are high health and welfare farms,”
he argued. "The husbandry of the birds is the crucial element
here. I think people think of hens roaming around a farm but that
image is no longer the case – that’s not how chicken is farmed
any more.”
Dr Zoë
Davies, chief executive of the National Pig Association (NPA), the
industry body for pig farmers, said farmers had to operate intensive
systems to compete with cheap European imports.
Intensive
farms have to meet many different regulations to get an Environment
Agency permit, she said, and the biggest farms have excellent
resources to maintain welfare standards, such as specialist vets on
site.
She
reiterated that there was a lack of consumer demand for free-range
meat.
“People
like the idea of a family farm,” she said. “They don’t
know what an actual farm looks like."
A
spokesperson for major poultry company Faccenda said the scale of big
farms allowed them to afford to invest in green technologies.
“On
large modern farms it’s easier to create and maintain the right
environment, meaning that our animals are raised somewhere that is
warm, dry and clean, and the risk of air borne diseases, such as
avian influenza, is greatly reduced,” she said.
“Through
investing in fewer, larger facilities we make the best use of scarce
agricultural land and reduce the environmental impact of our farms.
We have for example biomass energy on all of our farms.”
Source:
Comments
Post a Comment