Page 8 - National Poultry Newspaper

A typical broiler farm setup.
In fact, chicken has the lowest environmental footprint of any meat.
In terms of waste... there is virtually no wast- age from chicken meat production!
What isn’t used in prod- ucts for human consump- tion mostly ends up in a range of rendered or fresh products used in animal and pet foods.
Used litter being prepared for reuse.
The way we rear most
Sustainable chicken farming
WITH all agricultural industries across Aus- tralia looking at how they can operate more sustainably and consid- ering whether and when a carbon neutral future may be possible, it is timely to reflect on what the chicken industry’s environmental impact is and celebrate its unique achievements.
chickens today – housed in large sheds or barns that have been designed so that they provide as closely as is possible ideal climatic conditions, with food and water laid on continuously and the birds fed a diet that very pre- cisely matches their ideal dietary nutrient profile for each stage of growth – means that we can opti- mise the flocks’ growth and minimise the amount of feed the birds require to grow.
sessment to Quantify the Environmental Impact of Chicken Meat Production’.
products and it also con- tributes valuable organic matter to soils.
It’s a fact that most com- mercial chicken meat pro- duction today is farmed intensively, but did you know that this helps to contribute to its very modest environmental impacts?
In these farming sys- tems, we can also reduce the amount of energy that the chickens themselves need to put into maintain- ing their body tempera- ture, and in finding food and water.
The results from the Australian LCA are broadly consistent with a significant body of over- seas research and con- firms that poultry produc- tion is the most environ- mentallysustainableland- based way to produce quality animal protein for human consumption. Waste
As a rough guide, a bit over two thirds of the weight of the live chicken that leaves the farm ends up in products for human consumption.
Why is this the case?
Water use
One of the biggest de- terminants of how much energy is used and how greenhouse gasses are created in the produc- tion of livestock products, such as chicken and other meats and dairy products, is how efficiently the ani- mals convert feed into ed- ible product.
All this translates to more efficient use of feed, energy and water to pro- duce each kilogram of chicken meat, with less greenhouse gas emissions created.
For a start, as described above, chickens are amaz- ingly efficient converters of feed into meat.
Because there is a very close relationship between how much an animal eats and how much it drinks – in the case of chickens, it’s about 2L of water for every kilogram of feed consumed – this means that the more efficiently an animal converts feed into product, the more ef- ficiently it uses drinking water also... so modern poultry production wins again!
This is because feed rep- resents the biggest source of these impacts.
The above also applies for free range production systems where chickens are also housed in large sheds but have access to an outdoor range area dur- ing daylight hours – once they have reached an age where they are relatively safe from predation and can better cope with vari- able outside temperatures.
On average a meat chicken on a typical Aus- tralian commercial farm will consume about 1.6kg of feed for every kilo of body weight it puts on, and this ratio – kg of feed in : kg of body weight pro- duced – is reducing all the time, due to superior bird genetics, better bird nu- trition and improved bird health, husbandry prac- tices and management.
The good news is that chickens are the most ef- ficient converters of feed into meat of all land- based livestock species.
Is there actual hard evi- dence of this?
The more efficiently the chickens convert their feed – which is mostly grains – into meat, the less nutrients that get depos- ited in their manure.
The area of commercial chicken meat production where most water used is in the processing plant, water is a critical input for the carcass cleaning and chilling processes.
In fact, there is abundant evidence in support, and most has come from stud- ies using life cycle assess- ment methodologies.
As per above, the way we grow chickens in Aus- tralia today maximises this efficiency.
However, chicken pro- cessing companies have invested a significant amount of time, money and effort over the past ten years into finding and implementing new ways of reducing water usage in their plants, without com- promising food safety.
For relevant commen- tary, listen to chicken.org. au/podcasts/
Chicken litter is there- fore not a waste product, it’s a valuable resource used in the production chain of other crops and foods.
The report is available at agrifutures.com.au/wp- content/uploads/publica tions/12-029.pdf
At the chicken process- ing plant, there is virtually no waste either!
LCA is a tool being used worldwide to estimate the environmental impacts associated with producing a particular product from ‘cradle-to-grave’, taking into account the environ- mental impacts involved in producing the product and those generated in creating the inputs into a particular product.
But what of the nutrients that do end up on the shed floor?
This has resulted in massive reductions in the amount of water used to process each chicken.
For instance, the impacts associated with producing the grains that are fed to chickens, or in generat- ing the energy that may be used on-farm or in the processing plant.
Well, the used litter, the bird’s bedding plus ma- nure that remains on the floor of the chicken shed after a batch of chickens has been collected to be processed is taken out of the shed, loaded into trailers and is generally trucked off for use in com- posts or in organic ferti- liser for a range of differ- ent applications, such as horticulture, viticulture, broadacre farming, pas- ture and turf farms.
Indeed, industry ini- tiatives in this area have been recognised nation- ally.
Research conducted on the environmental im- pacts of Australian chick- en meat have confirmed that chicken meat produc- tion generates low levels of greenhouse gas emis- sions and results in mod- est levels of energy and water use.
Even better, the use of chicken litter as fertiliser – not only reduces the amount of artificial or in- organic fertilisers that re- quire significant amounts of energy to produce, such as urea and superphos- phate – across Australia is used to produce a di- verse range of other food
In 2010, Inghams En- terprises was recognised with the Prime Minister’s Water Wise Award for its adoption of advanced water treatment technolo- gies, which enabled the company’s Brisbane plant to treat wastewater from the poultry processing plant to drinking water quality, thereby reducing its reliance on mains wa- ter by 70 percent.
Agricultural scien- tist Stephen Wiedemann worked on the research, ‘Using Life Cycle As-
To put things into per- spective, the LCA con- ducted for Australian chicken meat referred to above, concluded that the average 1.7kg whole chicken requires less wa- ter to produce throughout the whole supply chain than an average 4-minute shower – up to the point that it leaves the plant for retail sale and ultimate cooking.
The more efficiently an animal converts feed into
product, the more efficiently it uses drinking water.
Add this to the finding that the total greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing that chick- en would be equivalent to the emissions that would be generated by driving a car to collect the same chicken from the local supermarket or chicken shop, and I think the case for the environmental sustainability of modern chicken meat production clearly stacks up.
Page 8 – National Poultry Newspaper, March 2021
Dr Vivien Kite
www.poultrynews.com.au