Rapid Development Of U.K. Broiler Industry

Press, Volume C, Issue 29510, 11 May 1961, Page 13

Rapid Development Of U.K. Broiler Industry

Last year Mr J. H. Jones, poultry instructor of the Department of Agriculture in Oamaru, revisited Britain after an absence of 10 years. When he first left Britain for New Zealand there was no broiler industry. Last year he found a rapidly expanding industry already returning British broiler producers £som a year.

Speaking to the poultry farmers’ refresher course at Canterbury Agricultural College, Lincoln, Mr Jones said that every poultry farmer he visited was talking about broilers. The industry was considered by many to be the most efficient branch of British agriculture. In 1954 5 million broilers were produced: last year the figure was 100 million. He had been told by a member of the British Broiler Growers’ Association that the target set for 1965 was 350 million birds.

The broiler industry in Britain could never have ex-

panded so swiftly without the help of the feeding stuffs manufacturers, said Mr Jones. Their advisory staff were first class, and it seemed that much of the information on poultry husbandry and business costing and marketing came directly from the work of these private advisory officers and their experimental farms. One-man Units

“The average broiler farm we visited on our trip was often a one-man unit, usually with two houses each holding 10,000 to 15.000 birds,” said Mr Jones. “These houses are filled with chicks four times a year, the birds being 10 to 11 weeks of age when marketed. In the fortnight between batches, with outside assistance, the houses are cleaned, disinfected and fumigated and relittered for the next crop. “So you see that one man with assistance for eight weeks rears 80,000 to 100,000 broiler birds a year. The average weight a bird for the crop is 341 b with a conversion rate of 2.5 to 2.81 b of feed to the pound pf meat or about 81b to 101 b of feed a bird.”

On a single farm, using a good broiler ration costing £4l a ton the feed bill was about £15,000 to £20,000 a year. “A feed bill of such magnitude for a one man and a boy plant will give you some idea of the turnover and intensity of these new chicken factories,” he said. Sales Effort The broiler industry received no subsidy but probably owed much of its rapid expansion to the sales effort of the industry itself. The Broiler Growers’ Association, to which it seemed every grower belonged, conducted a continuous advertising campaign to sell chickens. The big commercial groups, to which many growers belonged, also conducted campaigns to sell chickens under their own brand names in supermarkets and chain stores.

“We found that the cheapest meat we could buy in Britain was New Zealand lamb, followed by broiler chicken.” To be successful broiler growing had to be on a sufficiently large scale to be economic and as a result most growers were on a planned production and belonged to an organisation or group that had long-term ability to process, pack, and market the birds. Most groups owned their own processing plant, and at the outset all members met, and with the management of the supplying hatchery, hammered out a plan to ensure that all members were working to full capacity and by keeping up a constant supply of chickens kept the overhead costs of the processing plant to a minimum. "Cost Conscious”

"You can see how cost conscious broiler growers are,” said Mr Jones. "All 1 visited cculd quote offhand the cost of chicks housed, food conversion and net profit a bird. Incidentally, the profit a bird had dropped from 2s five years ago to between 6d and 9d last year, and several growers expected a further drop to around 4d a bird before the easymoney section of the industry got tired of hard work and retired.’’

•*I wonder how many millionaires have been created in the United Kingdom as a result of the broiler industry,” said the chairman of the New Zealand Poultry Board (Mr G. L. McLatchie), who spoke after Mr Jones. “I cannot help thinking that the biggest millionaires will be the feed producers, and then the builders of sheds, and I think that producers will come somewhere down the scale. “I do not think the board would be very enthusiastic about the development of an industry along these lines. I cannot help feeling that it would be a benefit to a few, but not to the many in this country.”