- Thread starter
- #11
Food Inc.. I have not heard of it but I will rent it this week! Thanks for the tip!
For those who raise meat birds! (Finished Paper Pg. 4)
- Thread starter Morgan7782
- Start date
- Mar 21, 2010
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Has anybody here had a flock wiped out from disease? Please share your experience, and what you did to fix the problem.(excluding deaths due to weight
Complete flock wipe out? Only if coyotes can be called a disease...
I lose a few in each batch, never yet the whole flock.
What are some personal pro's to raising your own meat birds?
As someone mentioned already, I know where the bird as been and the trip it took to my table and everything it has been exposed to along the way. Ditto for my eggs.
What sort of epidemic could you see happening if the US was to change from big company broiler companies back to family run farms and sales? (Provided there was enough land* this is strictly a "what if" question)
The epidemic I see would be "the return of sanity and common sense" and "panic from those without either". Any resource where the supply is centralized and consolidated is prone to catastrophic failure at some point. Seriously though, something bad widespread certainly can be contained with fewer sources to be infected, but the impact would be greater. Diseases mutate over time and distance- 100,000 chickens being infected in a factory farm setting would most likely have a greater overall mortaility rate over 100 chickens on 1000 farms.
Complete flock wipe out? Only if coyotes can be called a disease...
What are some personal pro's to raising your own meat birds?
As someone mentioned already, I know where the bird as been and the trip it took to my table and everything it has been exposed to along the way. Ditto for my eggs.
What sort of epidemic could you see happening if the US was to change from big company broiler companies back to family run farms and sales? (Provided there was enough land* this is strictly a "what if" question)
The epidemic I see would be "the return of sanity and common sense" and "panic from those without either". Any resource where the supply is centralized and consolidated is prone to catastrophic failure at some point. Seriously though, something bad widespread certainly can be contained with fewer sources to be infected, but the impact would be greater. Diseases mutate over time and distance- 100,000 chickens being infected in a factory farm setting would most likely have a greater overall mortaility rate over 100 chickens on 1000 farms.
No flock wiped out so far... very thankful on that account.
My personal pros: I know where the meat has come from. I know what these chickens have and have not eaten and I know that they have had an excellent quality of life. The prophylactic antibiotics that large chicken producers feed their animals is creating major problems with drug-resistant bacteria. I also like knowing that my chickens have been able to scratch for bugs, doze in the sun and just get out and flap their wings.
My four-year-old daughter plays a large role in helping to care for these chickens and knows that she will someday be eating the chickens. This makes her aware of the true value of meat; it's not just a 79 cents a pound commodity at the grocery store, it's a living, breathing creature. If we are going to make a conscientious decision to eat meat, we really need to know the full consequences of our actions, and I am proud to be teaching my daughter that early in life.
Unfortunately, I think there would be a much greater chance of an epidemic if the US changed from big broiler companies to family run farms. I know a little too much about this because I work at the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense, and a large part of my work is to implement a system to contact small animal producers on a large scale because small farms are where most major diseases get started. For example, look up Exotic Newcastle Disease (END). There was a large outbreak of Exotic Newcastle Disease in California in 2003. This disease was present but undetected in small flocks for several years before it got spread to several poultry houses and caused an epidemic, resulting in a huge ban on bird movement throughout a large portion of California. Even though commercial producers cause a much larger problem if they have a disease outbreak, they are better equipped to control it and it is less likely to spread from that location.
Large corporations have extensive checks and balances to ensure that their chickens stay healthy, for example most companies have an "all in, all out" policy, particularly with their broilers. If one group of chickens becomes ill, the disease is limited to that one group of chickens, and cannot easily become chronic and passed from one generation to the next. Also, most broiler houses are sterilized after every 2-3 groups of chickens, regardless of whether or not the other flocks showed signs of illness. Large companies have a huge number of safeguards, for example Foster Farms has a policy that its employees cannot own pet birds. Small owners are capable of doing the same, and some probably have more intense security, but not everybody is going to.
People are going to bring adult birds into their flock who are chronic carriers of some disease or visit someone else's chickens and inadvertently bring back some illness. If someone gets salmonella from a backyard broiler flock, it won't even make a blip on the radar because its too small of a scale. It's the large scale production of anything which gets us worried, I mean whoever heard of getting E. Coli from spinach?? I truly believe that if all broiler production switched to small scale, we wouldn't ever hear of anyone getting sick from eating chicken. Is that because it wouldn't happen? No. It's because no one would care enough to put it in the news, and probably wouldn't even care enough to track back the illness to the producer.
Additionally, it is very difficult to reach and educate small scale farmers on a large scale. Most of us small farmers don't know the signs of every disease, and we aren't necessarily going to report it if our flock does get sick. Maybe we have a disease outbreak and half our birds die but the other half recover and seem fine - that could be a very serious disease and we're not going to think twice if we sell one of our birds to our cousin Mary two years later. We just infected her flock too - she has half her hens get sick and die and the other half recover, then she sells one of her birds to her neighbor Fred. You can see how these things perpetuate themselves.
Ok... sorry for the essay
Hope this helps - feel free to use whatever you want and/or quote me if you think this drivel is worth quoting. You are also welcome to PM me if you have any questions. Good luck!
My personal pros: I know where the meat has come from. I know what these chickens have and have not eaten and I know that they have had an excellent quality of life. The prophylactic antibiotics that large chicken producers feed their animals is creating major problems with drug-resistant bacteria. I also like knowing that my chickens have been able to scratch for bugs, doze in the sun and just get out and flap their wings.
My four-year-old daughter plays a large role in helping to care for these chickens and knows that she will someday be eating the chickens. This makes her aware of the true value of meat; it's not just a 79 cents a pound commodity at the grocery store, it's a living, breathing creature. If we are going to make a conscientious decision to eat meat, we really need to know the full consequences of our actions, and I am proud to be teaching my daughter that early in life.
Unfortunately, I think there would be a much greater chance of an epidemic if the US changed from big broiler companies to family run farms. I know a little too much about this because I work at the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense, and a large part of my work is to implement a system to contact small animal producers on a large scale because small farms are where most major diseases get started. For example, look up Exotic Newcastle Disease (END). There was a large outbreak of Exotic Newcastle Disease in California in 2003. This disease was present but undetected in small flocks for several years before it got spread to several poultry houses and caused an epidemic, resulting in a huge ban on bird movement throughout a large portion of California. Even though commercial producers cause a much larger problem if they have a disease outbreak, they are better equipped to control it and it is less likely to spread from that location.
Large corporations have extensive checks and balances to ensure that their chickens stay healthy, for example most companies have an "all in, all out" policy, particularly with their broilers. If one group of chickens becomes ill, the disease is limited to that one group of chickens, and cannot easily become chronic and passed from one generation to the next. Also, most broiler houses are sterilized after every 2-3 groups of chickens, regardless of whether or not the other flocks showed signs of illness. Large companies have a huge number of safeguards, for example Foster Farms has a policy that its employees cannot own pet birds. Small owners are capable of doing the same, and some probably have more intense security, but not everybody is going to.
People are going to bring adult birds into their flock who are chronic carriers of some disease or visit someone else's chickens and inadvertently bring back some illness. If someone gets salmonella from a backyard broiler flock, it won't even make a blip on the radar because its too small of a scale. It's the large scale production of anything which gets us worried, I mean whoever heard of getting E. Coli from spinach?? I truly believe that if all broiler production switched to small scale, we wouldn't ever hear of anyone getting sick from eating chicken. Is that because it wouldn't happen? No. It's because no one would care enough to put it in the news, and probably wouldn't even care enough to track back the illness to the producer.
Additionally, it is very difficult to reach and educate small scale farmers on a large scale. Most of us small farmers don't know the signs of every disease, and we aren't necessarily going to report it if our flock does get sick. Maybe we have a disease outbreak and half our birds die but the other half recover and seem fine - that could be a very serious disease and we're not going to think twice if we sell one of our birds to our cousin Mary two years later. We just infected her flock too - she has half her hens get sick and die and the other half recover, then she sells one of her birds to her neighbor Fred. You can see how these things perpetuate themselves.
Ok... sorry for the essay
Where were those checks and balances on the half a billion egg recall? To me, even though they have regulations and great bio-security things happen and when they happen it's on a massive stage like the last egg recall. Recently had a meat recall from Wally World too... just after. Greatest egg recall in history.... never heard of these things happening 60 years ago... and I doubt they would happen if everyone went back to backyard farming. Traded eggs for bread and vise versa...
Factory farms are not sustainable and I believe more of that will uncover in the future.
On a small scale farm or small farm less people are effected, way easier to trace, and small enough to clean up the issue.
Factory farms are not sustainable and I believe more of that will uncover in the future.
On a small scale farm or small farm less people are effected, way easier to trace, and small enough to clean up the issue.
Quote:
You know, don't get me wrong... I think the world would be a much better place if all the chickens were raised by backyard breeders. I know that you are right - we never did hear of these things happening 60 years ago BUT I feel that we didn't hear of them because they were small scale, not because they didn't happen. There were probably a greater NUMBER of incidents, but they were unrelated so no one cared. Less people die of food-borne illnesses now than they did 60 years ago, partly because of all the checks and balances we do have.
You ask where the checks and balances were during the egg recall - I'm sure they were in place to an extent. When you have that number of animals crowded together in the horrid living conditions that laying hens are, you are going to have a higher risk for disease. I just think its a miracle that we don't have more problems with disease than we do. If you ask the average chicken owner how many diseases have gone through their flock in the past 15 years, there is almost certainly going to be a large number. If you ask the same question to a laying farm or a commercial broiler house, their number is going to be MUCH lower, despite the deplorable conditions these animals live in. It's just that when they do have a disease outbreak, we hear about it because of the number of people it affects.
No system is perfect and our food animal industry is pretty @$#@ screwed up. I won't buy a meat chicken from the store any more because I don't want to eat what they stand for. I just looked up articles on antibiotic resistant bacteria in commercial broilers and found 249 peer-reviewed journal articles. I do think that broiler chickens are treated better than some livestock, particularly better than laying hens, but I have a major problem with the prophylactic antibiotics which they receive and the high mortality rate that broiler houses have (as well as other methods they use to raise chickens).
I do, however, think that if there were only large scale poultry operations and no small farm breeders, we would have a much reduced incident of disease. When a disease was present, it would be 1000X worse, but it would affect less birds overall than it does as our industry is set up now.
If I could create a perfect poultry raising operation, I would do one of two things (neither of which are at all realistic):
1) Have a lot of small farm owners who are required to have a (free) license to raise their birds. In order to maintain their license, they need to take yearly classes on poultry disease and other health concerns and they need to register for a national list so if there is a disease epidemic, they can be contacted.
2) Have all the poultry owned by large scale commercial operations. (wait for it!) These operations would have a minimum space per bird of 10 square feet (ha) and would be in a situation similar to free ranging. They would be run by knowledgeable handlers who were well trained to recognize any form of disease and a sufficient number of handlers to adequately observe all those birds (double ha). These birds would be able to have access to outdoors with adequate free space and sunshine as well as shelter from the elements. Not sure what planet this system could exist on though... certainly not this one.
I also think that the price of all of our meat needs to increase dramatically! People need to stop looking at chicken as an easy, cheap dinner and look at it as an animal which was sacrificed for them. People also need to be able to raise chickens in humane conditions and still make money on it.
So I really do agree with you that our poultry industry has major issues, but I do think that the industry has a lower per-capita disease rate than the typical backyard farmer.
You know, don't get me wrong... I think the world would be a much better place if all the chickens were raised by backyard breeders. I know that you are right - we never did hear of these things happening 60 years ago BUT I feel that we didn't hear of them because they were small scale, not because they didn't happen. There were probably a greater NUMBER of incidents, but they were unrelated so no one cared. Less people die of food-borne illnesses now than they did 60 years ago, partly because of all the checks and balances we do have.
You ask where the checks and balances were during the egg recall - I'm sure they were in place to an extent. When you have that number of animals crowded together in the horrid living conditions that laying hens are, you are going to have a higher risk for disease. I just think its a miracle that we don't have more problems with disease than we do. If you ask the average chicken owner how many diseases have gone through their flock in the past 15 years, there is almost certainly going to be a large number. If you ask the same question to a laying farm or a commercial broiler house, their number is going to be MUCH lower, despite the deplorable conditions these animals live in. It's just that when they do have a disease outbreak, we hear about it because of the number of people it affects.
No system is perfect and our food animal industry is pretty @$#@ screwed up. I won't buy a meat chicken from the store any more because I don't want to eat what they stand for. I just looked up articles on antibiotic resistant bacteria in commercial broilers and found 249 peer-reviewed journal articles. I do think that broiler chickens are treated better than some livestock, particularly better than laying hens, but I have a major problem with the prophylactic antibiotics which they receive and the high mortality rate that broiler houses have (as well as other methods they use to raise chickens).
I do, however, think that if there were only large scale poultry operations and no small farm breeders, we would have a much reduced incident of disease. When a disease was present, it would be 1000X worse, but it would affect less birds overall than it does as our industry is set up now.
If I could create a perfect poultry raising operation, I would do one of two things (neither of which are at all realistic):
1) Have a lot of small farm owners who are required to have a (free) license to raise their birds. In order to maintain their license, they need to take yearly classes on poultry disease and other health concerns and they need to register for a national list so if there is a disease epidemic, they can be contacted.
2) Have all the poultry owned by large scale commercial operations. (wait for it!) These operations would have a minimum space per bird of 10 square feet (ha) and would be in a situation similar to free ranging. They would be run by knowledgeable handlers who were well trained to recognize any form of disease and a sufficient number of handlers to adequately observe all those birds (double ha). These birds would be able to have access to outdoors with adequate free space and sunshine as well as shelter from the elements. Not sure what planet this system could exist on though... certainly not this one.
I also think that the price of all of our meat needs to increase dramatically! People need to stop looking at chicken as an easy, cheap dinner and look at it as an animal which was sacrificed for them. People also need to be able to raise chickens in humane conditions and still make money on it.
So I really do agree with you that our poultry industry has major issues, but I do think that the industry has a lower per-capita disease rate than the typical backyard farmer.
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Two things here.
BigPeeps- have you tried spraying vinegar on your weeds? A friend of mine tried that, just sprayed straight vinegar on them, and they shriveled up and died within 48 hours.
SpringChickens- I have to disagree with you on a couple of points. The first one is this. One big reason that sick poultry from big companies is a lot more likely to cause an epidemic is sheer volume. For a backyard flock, sick or healthy, how many birds do they ship out or sell in a month? For me on the high end might be ten. How many birds do the big companies move out DAILY? I would imagine that a lot of times sick birds will be shipped/butchered before they even show signs of illness. This probably happens more than we realize because not all of the diseases that poultry carry are communicable to humans anyway. Not to mention the fact that the way birds are kept in the big factories positively BEGS for disease, hundreds or even thousands of birds crammed together under stress, what could possibly go wrong there?
Plus the fact that if a disease comes from a small family run farm, how many people is it going to affect? Certainly not the thousands that were affected by the enormous egg recall that Brunty_Farms mentioned. And when I butchered my own birds this year, I was able to sanitize the cleaning table after every bird, not after every couple of groups. Along with the fact that I know everything my birds ate, how clean they were kept, and that they had good lives before they were butchered.
I do understand what you mean about the difficulty of educating small farmers about diseases, sanitation, etc, but people are learning even if it seems slow.
People know so much more about how to keep clean now, and the dangers of not keeping clean/sanitary, that I can only see (IMO) small farms getting better. So that is my two cents, and my reasons for wanting to keep my meat at home where (I think!) it belongs.
BigPeeps- have you tried spraying vinegar on your weeds? A friend of mine tried that, just sprayed straight vinegar on them, and they shriveled up and died within 48 hours.
SpringChickens- I have to disagree with you on a couple of points. The first one is this. One big reason that sick poultry from big companies is a lot more likely to cause an epidemic is sheer volume. For a backyard flock, sick or healthy, how many birds do they ship out or sell in a month? For me on the high end might be ten. How many birds do the big companies move out DAILY? I would imagine that a lot of times sick birds will be shipped/butchered before they even show signs of illness. This probably happens more than we realize because not all of the diseases that poultry carry are communicable to humans anyway. Not to mention the fact that the way birds are kept in the big factories positively BEGS for disease, hundreds or even thousands of birds crammed together under stress, what could possibly go wrong there?
Plus the fact that if a disease comes from a small family run farm, how many people is it going to affect? Certainly not the thousands that were affected by the enormous egg recall that Brunty_Farms mentioned. And when I butchered my own birds this year, I was able to sanitize the cleaning table after every bird, not after every couple of groups. Along with the fact that I know everything my birds ate, how clean they were kept, and that they had good lives before they were butchered.
I do understand what you mean about the difficulty of educating small farmers about diseases, sanitation, etc, but people are learning even if it seems slow.
"I also think that the price of all of our meat needs to increase dramatically! People need to stop looking at chicken as an easy, cheap dinner and look at it as an animal which was sacrificed for them. People also need to be able to raise chickens in humane conditions and still make money on it."
Wow....I think that is a very good way to ensure that a lot of people simply stop eating meat. If we didn't raise our own, that would certainly mean that we couldn't afford it. My DH is out of work right now, along with what seems like half the country. How would you expect people to BUY this incredibly expensive meat?
Wow....I think that is a very good way to ensure that a lot of people simply stop eating meat. If we didn't raise our own, that would certainly mean that we couldn't afford it. My DH is out of work right now, along with what seems like half the country. How would you expect people to BUY this incredibly expensive meat?
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- Thread starter
- #18
Beautiful responses everybody! I am enjoying every bit that I learn and will definately be using some good points folks made here. It's interesting to see the different responses as well. My paper will be pro small farm operations because that is where I stand, but it is a pursuasive paper so I need to combine opinion and fact. Anybody have any insightful websites with statistics ect? Thank you so much again!
- Aug 18, 2008
- 1,433
- 10
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Don't forget to place some of that blame at the feet of the big factory lobbyist groups (United Egg Producers) who really really don't like backyard chicken owners. (Look at the ones who tried to shut down Joel Salatin / Polyface Farms for being 'unsafe' yet when they did tests, his processed birds had less pathogens and bacteria)
Many government food processing regulator agencies are effectively toothless (w/r/t salmonella, BP oil spill, etc). The good news is that right now we have an opportunity to give the FDA a lot more authority. WashPIRG is pushing for the FDA Modernization Act to pass in the Senate. This act will give the FDA the authority to mandate recalls, inspect food processing facilities and ensure that imported foods are held to the same standards as those produced in the United States. The bill has already passed in Congress and in committee in the Senate so the Senate as a whole just needs to vote on it before October recess.
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Quote:
I desperately want to raise chickens for meat, I *hope* to start next year. I've only processed roosters that I could not rehome in the past. The boyfriend, however, will not eat any home grown meat a) because he doesn't like dark meat (and the ones I've done were not meat birds and tough), and b) because he knew the bird as a baby chick.
I want to raise my own for meat because the idea of factory farming sickens me. I don't like knowing that after the bird is eviscerated it is soaked in poo water baths to lower the body temp and then rinsed several times with chlorine to 'clean' the bird. I can do a much better and cleaner job of that at home! I hate knowing that the overgrown birds cannot support their own body rate and grow so fast that their internal organs can shut down and they die in their crowded dirty barns. Their stomach/breast area doesn't even have feathers because they sit in their own feces.
Factory "farms" produce a product, just like Dell makes computers. It just isn't honest natural meat from animals who were alive to me.
Don't forget to place some of that blame at the feet of the big factory lobbyist groups (United Egg Producers) who really really don't like backyard chicken owners. (Look at the ones who tried to shut down Joel Salatin / Polyface Farms for being 'unsafe' yet when they did tests, his processed birds had less pathogens and bacteria)
Many government food processing regulator agencies are effectively toothless (w/r/t salmonella, BP oil spill, etc). The good news is that right now we have an opportunity to give the FDA a lot more authority. WashPIRG is pushing for the FDA Modernization Act to pass in the Senate. This act will give the FDA the authority to mandate recalls, inspect food processing facilities and ensure that imported foods are held to the same standards as those produced in the United States. The bill has already passed in Congress and in committee in the Senate so the Senate as a whole just needs to vote on it before October recess.
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Quote:
I desperately want to raise chickens for meat, I *hope* to start next year. I've only processed roosters that I could not rehome in the past. The boyfriend, however, will not eat any home grown meat a) because he doesn't like dark meat (and the ones I've done were not meat birds and tough), and b) because he knew the bird as a baby chick.
I want to raise my own for meat because the idea of factory farming sickens me. I don't like knowing that after the bird is eviscerated it is soaked in poo water baths to lower the body temp and then rinsed several times with chlorine to 'clean' the bird. I can do a much better and cleaner job of that at home! I hate knowing that the overgrown birds cannot support their own body rate and grow so fast that their internal organs can shut down and they die in their crowded dirty barns. Their stomach/breast area doesn't even have feathers because they sit in their own feces.
Factory "farms" produce a product, just like Dell makes computers. It just isn't honest natural meat from animals who were alive to me.
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Quote:
Unfortunately all of the website that I know of with statistics are on the side of large scale, commercial farms. You can definitely look up antibiotic resistance in broiler chickens and find a bunch of stuff - if your school has a library website where you can look up journal articles, that's a good place to start. Most of the other stuff is subjective; maybe you could find a website which compared mortality rates between commercial chickens and backyard chickens, but I doubt it. I don't think anyone could put statistics on how happy a chicken is or their quality of life (although you could probably find out average square feet for commercial birds and poll byc and get the average square footage for us...).
I do think that you might try to look up nutritional differences between commercial and backyard birds. I think that you will find more omega-3s and probably a leaner carcass (if you can find that information).
I re-read your original post after I wrote the first essay, and realized that info wasn't what you were looking for (sorry...), but I do think its good to keep in mind. It may not be the popular opinion, but there are (very few) things which commercial operations have going for them that backyard breeders do not. That said, if every backyard owner operated their farm with the rigorous safety checks that commercial farms have, I think disease incidence would go WAY down and food safety would go up. Its just unrealistic to think that would ever happen (although I really do like my licensing idea...
)
Good luck with your paper!
Unfortunately all of the website that I know of with statistics are on the side of large scale, commercial farms. You can definitely look up antibiotic resistance in broiler chickens and find a bunch of stuff - if your school has a library website where you can look up journal articles, that's a good place to start. Most of the other stuff is subjective; maybe you could find a website which compared mortality rates between commercial chickens and backyard chickens, but I doubt it. I don't think anyone could put statistics on how happy a chicken is or their quality of life (although you could probably find out average square feet for commercial birds and poll byc and get the average square footage for us...).
I do think that you might try to look up nutritional differences between commercial and backyard birds. I think that you will find more omega-3s and probably a leaner carcass (if you can find that information).
I re-read your original post after I wrote the first essay, and realized that info wasn't what you were looking for (sorry...), but I do think its good to keep in mind. It may not be the popular opinion, but there are (very few) things which commercial operations have going for them that backyard breeders do not. That said, if every backyard owner operated their farm with the rigorous safety checks that commercial farms have, I think disease incidence would go WAY down and food safety would go up. Its just unrealistic to think that would ever happen (although I really do like my licensing idea...
Good luck with your paper!
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