Slept on things- decided to try and change the title of the this thread to "Call your Hatchery". Demand is a very strong word and it's not the tone intended, drumming up a bit of feisty replies that are wandering a bit off topic. To be sure, I don't use organic feed at most farms. It's simply not feasible. Profit margins for our working farms are quite small when dealing with poultry. We've adopted more sustainable protocols over the years and save money by not utilising soft feeds. On Martha's Vineyard where egg and meat sales are not an objective but rather feeding families, we do use organic and in order to make that affordable we are obliged to use cheaper commodities -organic corn, organic oats, which are cheaper and supplement with a small percentage of kibble. We don't use organic scratch grain because it's too expensive but do grow crops that ameliorate the winter diet and the birds have free range year around down here.
Getting back to hatcheries. I'd like to return to the issue of supply and demand for a moment. I get the sense that half the peeps that have written in assume that I'm down on hatcheries. that I'm criticizing hatcheries, and/or down on soy. None of these assumptions would be accurate. Hatcheries only want to sell healthy chicks. They love their customers and love their poultry. The issue is the demand for baby chicks and ducklings, poults and keats grows exponentially every single year. My friends that actually own hatcheries keep me informed of these things as well as requesting assistance with problems certain breeds have had in producing enough eggs to sustain the demand. Some breeds are actually being fazed out in a few catalogs because the major hatcheries that drop ships for them cannot get production high enough to sustain demand. These are important old heritage breeds that prove to be more sensitive to the makeup of their feed than others, like the new heritage egg production and broiler strains so many people rely on heavily. This is unfortunate because the old heritage breeds are likely going to live to a ripe old age. Old heritage breeds tend to produce eggs and chicks for quite a few years more than the production strains, which are just not designed to live or produce for more than a few seasons. This is why egg farmers are obliged to replace their production strains with such frequency, which is not a sustainable practice.
It's reaffirming to learn that so many people hatch their own or purchase from reputable breeders. Of course this has always been the case for poultier but not often the new hobbyist nor the small family farm and certainly not the farms that produce hundreds of eggs per week to your local farmers market.
Someone wrote me personally asking about this new soybean product. I'll answer to that here. Every month, feed producers like myself, receive commodity magazines and livestock feed journals the former loaded in advertisements and the latter with commentary and debate. Far from being alarmist, the trend is to embrace new technologies that increase yield and profit for feed commodity agrobusiness. When it comes to producing food for a global population all this discussion we are entitled to here is off. There's simply no point in pushing against a surging tide well above our heads. People like myself work to get my arms around the Cargills of the world and convince them- not through inflammatory rhetoric or confrontation but rather through meaningful dialogue the effects these products
may be having on the long-term health and genetic diversity of hatchery stock- and on to those that grow their own food.
Lots of people are attempting to have this same debate with the Monsantos of the world, which help to feed the Cargills of the world and we all know how that is turning out
at this moment in time. But this doesn't have to be the case.
There have been quite a few trends that have come and gone in livestock feed, feeding beef bi-products to cows and feather meal to chickens for example...
GMO SOY 1
GMO SOY 2
GMO SOY 3
GMO SOY 4
GMO SOY 5
I hope to encourage everyone
that actually does intend to purchase chicks from a hatchery this year, regardless if they've had no problems in the past to call their hatchery and request that they refrain from using round up ready soy in their breeding stock maintenance ration. They all have the choice to have their grain mills that produce feed for them be more circumspect about their use. It's not as if the feed mills have not heard about problems associated with it. They are in the business of feeding healthy livestock and trust me, there's plenty of urgent discussion going on about it at just about every feed mill working with this size of the market. The largest corporations that provide eggs and chickens for national supermarkets have their own feed mills and their own hatcheries. They aren't dealing with the family owned grain mills that make their living off of feeding breeder stock of hatcheries. They only desire to contribute to the health and well being of the hatcheries breeding stock- the hatcheries
root stock the hatcheries
genetic diversity.
They need to stay in business. Their local communities need to stay in business and this extends logically to the hatcheries themselves. Regardless, when the family owned mill is convinced by livestock feed and commodity journals that this brand spanking new GMO soy is the best bang for the buck- and the community farms contracted to maintain breeding stock and hatch for the hatcheries themselves
fail to take note of the warning signs they end up contributing to the poor overall health of that stock.
The community farms aren't all that concerned with the commodity journals or livestock feed trends. They are keeping tens of thousands of chickens in closed buildings that meet certain strict state government requirements and are
culling heavily every time some of the breed stock looks poorly. That breed stock came from some of these farms and individuals that those of you that bypass hatcheries altogether purchase your eggs and chicks from. Chicks don't just grow on trees in a factory. Someone has to provide the rootstock.
Last year hurricanes and tornadoes touched down over much of the USA and many of us experienced cancelled orders from smaller hatcheries destroyed in the weather.
Some of us lost our own stock in the storms and were desperate to replace that stock. When that stock is no longer available because so and so has health problems and liquidated their stock to a hatchery or just got out of birds altogether for financial reasons or whatever, more often than not, a big hole is left for the health and genetic diversity of the breed that long time poultier has laboured over for so many generations.
When an entity is contracted to breed tens of thousands of chickens for a hatchery they don't come at it from the same place of that old time poultier. They come at it from a probably more pragmatic place. They'll meet the laws and requirements head on. They'll keep the birds alive but intellectual curiosity, from my experience dealing with these farms, is limited. The world view is such that seeing these animals as precious treasures is just not possible. These are commodities with all the intrinsic worth as ears of corn.
If birds are gorging on feathers- and many won't because they're debeaked, that's not really much of a concern because all these hens and roosters are going to be turned into chicken meal for pet food manufactures come fall anyway. When birds lose weight and have difficulty standing up they are picked up and thrown into a wood chipper. It's that simple.
When these community farms go to pick up their feed their going to pinch the pennies as close to their waste as humanly possible. The profit margin grows with the use of these GMO commodities and the fact that demand is growing exponentially. Their communities are striving, as they should, they are making an honest wage, as they should. We cannot fault them for
anything. But when the consumer informs the hatchery that they will not tolerate the use of soy ( and let's face the facts folks- 99% of all soy produced is GMO at this point- that's a fact.) they will be obliged to make arrangements with their contracted farms to not include it in their breeding ration. These community farms are going to comply and actually gain from learning why it is that these late breaking soy products are not ethical to use- people should not be experimented on and I have a hard time believing anyone wants their hatchery chicks experimented on either.
Have you ever had a beloved pet die of cancer? Have you later learned that the use of specific vaccinations have been linked to these cancers? Have you found yourself beyond mortified that the tumours and ulcers that pet developed began at the vaccination site- or the health issues of the pet followed what was being said about potential problems with these vaccinations? Have you noticed how quickly the large pharmaceutical corporations that create these vaccinations make that news story /movement go away with self-generated reports that disprove the "theory" ? Those theories come about through consensus of nationwide veterinarians mind you.
Disclaimer- family is a major share holder in Novartis...I don't think all pharmaceutical companies are inherently evil - far from it.
Changes will be made to those vaccines, even though the companies often denied there was ever a problem. They don't want your pet to get cancer and they don't want the liability nor inflict damage to their stock rate.
So- do chickens even develop cancer? Who cares right? You'll just replace that hen that died slowly with new chicks next year -right? If you eat eggs every single day produced by chickens fed a generous ration of a soybean that
makes its own insecticide and that insecticide continues to replicate itself inside the body of the bird- are you in the least concerned that one of your children may develop thyroid conditions or increase the potential for cancer? That's a digression into your own feeding protocol but it speaks to what is being fed -more and more often to breeding stock of heirloom strains- yes- there are heirloom strains sold through hatcheries by the thousands - they are heirlooms because some hard core poultier created those strains over countless generations before the first founder flock was sold to a hatchery. And selling their breed stock to hatcheries every year is a huge part of their own income. Let's not squander the fruits of the poultier by substituting the health and well being of the breed stock for profit. And let's not enable unethical farming of breed stock. We do have a voice and we should use. If you disagree and want the hatchery to
use GMO go ahead and tell your hatchery that.
When I learned about this new family of soy recently I was left breathless. The old family of genetically modified soy was already bad news. This new improved version is even more of a risk that I just can't abide by. It's not soy I'm
against. I love edamame and miso and tofu. My trips to Japan are rife with all the above and I'm in heaven. When I get home, I still keep these soy products on hand. I buy them when I go for sushi night in the city and chow on them out of the fridge. So please get that out of your head. Soy is awesome.
But the product that's going into livestock feed rations isn't something that's had enough time or empirical studies to deserve inclusion in our food chain.
