Page 7 - National Poultry Newspaper

Australian chicken and plant-based alternatives: don’t believe the hype
Orego-Stim in early lay
A COMMERCIAL study was conducted from 2020 to 2021 onafarminLosAl- tos de Jalisco – a region with the high- est egg production in Mexico – to evaluate the effects of Orego- Stim powder on hen performance at the beginning of lay.
resulted in:
• An extra six whole
Two houses of 75,000 Bovans white hens were fed either a basal diet – control – or a basal diet sup- plemented with Ore- go-Stim powder.
duced in early lay
• A 25 percent im- provement in egg pro-
OS was included in the diet at 500g/t from 13 to 19 weeks of age, followed by 300g/t from 20 to 23 weeks of age.
• Improved profit- ability of $A0.74 per hen and a return on investment of 13.6:1.
Each group was sub- ject to the same en- vironmental and man- agement conditions.
Orego-Stim is a nat- ural solution to help optimise egg produc- tion in hens during early lay.
The addition of Orego-Stim powder to rearing and laying diets from 13 weeks to 23 weeks of age
Supporting egg pro- duction during this pe- riod may help hens in achieving their genetic potential during the entire laying cycle.
eggs per hen
• 84 percent greater
egg mass
• Earlier start in egg
production by three
weeks
• Heavier eggs
duction
• A 0.14 percent im-
provement in liveabil-
ity• Improved feed con- version efficiency
pro-
Figure 1. The effect of Orego-Stim on cumula- tive egg production.
VEGGIE burgers aren’t new, but it’s only relatively recently that marketing of plant-based alternatives has shifted from targeting vegetarian consumers to targeting environmentally conscious meat eaters.
health, climate change, constraints on natural re- sources and animal wel- fare.”
a lower greenhouse gas im- pact than most other meats, so any comparison needs to take this into account before making a claim.
Alternatively, if PBAs are produced in Australia then the specifics of Australian manufacturing and green- house gas from Australian energy sources needs to be taken into account.
person’s carbon footprint, there are many other fac- tors far more significant than this issue.
Manufacturers of PBAs have not been shy in tout- ing their products as dis- rupters and market leaders in terms of environmental impacts.
We investigated this and found many reasons to question the claims.
Second, the compari- sons are done in overseas markets, where impacts from chicken are typically higher than for Australian chicken, and where the im- pacts from PBAs are poten- tiallyunderestimatedifthe emissions generated while transporting these products to Australia from the coun- try of manufacture hasn’t been taken into account.
These factors need to be considered to make a fair comparison for products on the Australian retail shelf.
The manufacturers of Quorn claim that it has a “70 percent lower carbon footprint than chicken”, Sunfed chicken-free chick- en is marketed as “health- ier, both for you and the planet”, and choosing Be- yond Meat over traditional meat products will report- edly “address four grow- ing global issues – human
If a product is compared to ‘meat’, what meat is be- ing referred to?
Finally, for a typical por- tion size, the difference be- tween chicken and a PBA is modest.
But do the claims stack up when they are compared to Australian chicken meat?
To be meaningful, com- parisons must liken apples with apples – if they’re not, they are potentially mis- leading.
This year’s Australia Talks research found that 79 percent of people be- lieve it’s becoming more difficult to know which sources of information to trust.
First, claims are often vague.
Perhaps it’s time to chal- lenge misinformation that could mislead consumers, unfairly disadvantages Australian farmers and that are a distraction to mak- ingrealchangeinsustain- ability.
While some manufactur- ers have directly compared tobeef–thatisImpossible Burger – we found no stud- ies that compared to Aus- tralian chicken.
Using information from the scientific literature, impacts from a pea-based product compared to Aus- tralian chicken meat were less than the emissions from driving a car about 1km.
To learn more about the environmental facts around chicken meat production in Australia, visit facts.chicken.org.au/ environment/
There is a wide range of differences in the environ- mental impacts of the dif- ferent meat types.
While transport isn’t nec- essarily a large contribu- tion, it all adds up.
In the full gamut of avail- able measures to reduce a
Stephen Wiedemann
In fact, chicken meat has
Plant-based ‘meat’ – perhaps it’s time to challenge misinformation that could mis- lead consumers, unfairly disadvantage Australian farmers and that is a distraction to making real change in sustainability.
Managing director and principal scientist at Integrity Ag and Environment Stephen Wiedemann.
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National Poultry Newspaper, July 2021 – Page 7