Plucked!: The Truth About Chicken by Maryn McKenna

Author:Maryn McKenna
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781408707913
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2017-09-12T03:00:00+00:00

WHILE ALL OF THE FARMERS in the Netherlands collaborated with the new system—though the government described the program as voluntary, it was not really possible to refuse—some struggled more than others. Even when farmers were skilled and experienced and followed the new rules in good faith, they could run into difficulties.

In the tiny town of Reek, just a few miles from Oosterlaken’s property, brothers Rob and Egbert Wingens and their families run two broiler farms. They raise 250,000 chickens per flock, and eight flocks per year, of a fast-growing, broad-breasted hybrid sold by the international genetics company Aviagen, which long ago subsumed the Arbor Acres birds that came second in the Chicken of Tomorrow. (Aviagen’s birds, which originated with a Scottish company called Ross, are essentially the same as the Cornish cross raised by U.S. poultry farmers, which come from the company Cobb-Vantress and trace back to the Chicken of Tomorrow contest’s first-place winners.)

Unusual for the pig-centric southeast, the Wingenses come from a chicken family. Their grandfather had a small flock and a small herd of pigs, and their father expanded both; he was raising 40,000 broilers per year and 700 pigs when he retired and sold his property to his sons. Egbert bought a second farm close by. Both have low, friendly buildings of warm red brick close to the narrow paved road out front; large, modern metal barns out back; and an abundance of whimsical chicken-related garden art made by their father to amuse himself in retirement.

Fast-growth hybrid birds—the Wingenses’ will live 42 days before they are slaughtered—are completely legal under the new antibiotics rules, which say nothing about genetics. But they are culturally touchy in a society where supermarkets make buying decisions based on whether meat carries a Beter Leven (Better Life) animal welfare certification. Dutch welfare activists called the hybrid birds plofkip, “exploding chickens,” for the speed at which they grow.

“I call them bofkip, ‘lucky chicken,’ ” Rob countered. “They have been lucky for our family.”

Judged by the new Dutch standards, the Wingenses are responsible farmers; their animal daily dose per year comes out to 13 days, well within the green zone. But it was a challenge to manage the health of their hybrid birds under the strict new regulations. “It is a good mind-set, to use less antibiotics,” Egbert told me as we walked across the crunchy gravel separating the farmhouse from the chicken barns. “I don’t want to use any antibiotics unless I have to.”

Like almost all other broiler farmers, the Wingenses buy their birds as chicks, which are incubated at a Dutch hatchery and arrive when they are one day old. If the fluffball newborns arrive ill or weak, they cannot administer medication in the manner they formerly would have, even if they believe they know what is wrong. “From experience, we know that the first-choice drug that we are allowed to keep on hand will not work; we need the second choice or the third, but we cannot use those unless the veterinarian performs a test,” Egbert said.

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