80 Percent of Chicken Growers Never Sanitize Poop-Filled Crates

[marmar]

from Mother Jones:



I was going to call this post "The Poultry Industry's Dirty Secret," but then I got to thinking: Isn't that too broad? It raises the question of which dirty secret—the fact that it turns independent family farmers into low-income serfs? Intentionally feeds arsenic to chickens, which ends up both in meat and in ground water? Severely damages one of the nation's most productive fisheries with tainted chickenshit? Routinely sends out chicken that's infected with pathogens resistant to several antibiotics?

So I added the parenthetical modifier "latest." This one shocked even me. Reports the meat-industry trade journal Meatingplace (sub required):

Survey results seem to indicate that about 80 percent of poultry growers don’t ever sanitize their crates, according to an Auburn University survey of 10,317 farms. What’s more, just 18.3 percent sanitize their trucks and trailers—two areas that contribute to the spread of Salmonella and Campylobacter.

What does this mean? First it's important to get some definitions straight. For background, this Humane Society of the United States report (PDF) delivers a pretty good overview of how poultry facilities work. Every year, HSUS informs us, the industry raises 9 billion birds in sheds the size of 1.5 football fields (about 450 feet) lengthwise and 40 feet wide. These factory-style facilities hold as many as 20,000 chickens, with enough space to offer each about a letter-size piece of paper's worth by the time they reach market size. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/01/poultry-industrys-latest-dirty-secret

[FarCenter]

1. Chickens have a cloaca, a single posterior opening

It is used for mating, urination, defecation, and egg laying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca

[yellowcanine]

4. Yep. I always thought the cloaca was proof that "Intelligent Design" is a crock of chicken poop.

Because no intelligent designer would design it that way, it seems to me.

[HopeHoops]

2. Why bother? They'll just crap some more.

[yellowcanine]

3. Normally transport of the chickens to slaughter is not done by the grower.....

In the vertically integrated poultry industry it is normally the processor who transports the chickens either directly with their own trucks or through use of a contractor. In most situations the grower does not even own the chickens. The processor provides the chickens and the feed, etc. The grower provides the house and the labor. In an ironic twist the grower does not own the chickens or the feed but he is responsible for the chicken waste. In fact in some cases it is part of the grower's compensation, the reasoning being that it has fertilizer value. Go figure.


I don't know whether the crates are normally cleaned between loads or not.