News from around the world
Rising disease costs and slowing growth rates are threatening the future of the billion-dollar farmed salmon industry. A new study has estimated that disease and lice management represented almost one-third of production costs per kilogram of farmed Norwegian salmon in 2020.
More than a million people in Spain are drinking water contaminated by nitrates, according to a report by the NGO Ecologistas en Acción, which blames the contamination on intensive livestock farms and the use of slurry waste from these farms, as well as fertilisers in irrigated agriculture.
Ghanaian farmers have called for import tariffs on chickens, to encourage local production and discourage people from importing poultry products. Victor Oppon Ajay of the Ghana National Poultry Farmers Association (GNP-FA) said it would include frozen products.
Israeli researchers say they have developed gene-edited hens that lay eggs from which only female chicks hatch. This could prevent the slaughter of billions of male chickens each year, which are culled because they don’t lay eggs. Last year, we reported that UK retailers were allegedly blocking moves to end the killing of millions of day-old male chicks each year.
French farmers have taken the unprecedented step of using female ducks and geese to produce foie gras, after shortages when millions of birds were culled due to the bird flu epidemic. Meanwhile, the Flemish region of Belgium, Flanders, closed its last site force-feeding animals to produce foie gras at the start of 2023.
A ban on the use of battery cages in New Zealand has sparked egg shortages and soaring interest in poultry. The cages were outlawed from 1 January after a government commitment to ban them in 2012, when 86% of layer hens were battery-farmed. By December 2022, that number had fallen to 10%.
UK news
Eggs laid by hens kept in barns for months on end could be classed as free range under changes being considered by the government to keep farmers competitive with Europe. As previously reported by Animals Farmed, ministers are considering tearing up free-range egg rules.
The UK’s poultry flock has been the hardest hit in Europe by bird flu, in terms of the number of cases on farms and the number of birds culled during the autumn. There were 398 outbreaks in domestic poultry across Europe, with 115 occurring in the UK. Meanwhile, in the US the virus has led to the deaths of some 52.7 million birds.
The former director of a free-range egg company was jailed for two years and three months for animal welfare and hygiene offences, which led to the deaths of approximately 2,000 hens. Peter Armitage owned Caithness Free Range Eggs and was also banned from keeping animals for 15 years.
Livestock farms in England polluted rivers 300 times last year, causing 20 major incidents, according to the latest government figures. Yet only six farms were prosecuted in 2021, with the Environment Agency giving out warning letters instead. It comes after government efforts were labelled an “abject failure” when two-thirds of farms in Devon were found to be causing pollution.
The UK meat industry has reacted with anger after the National Food Crime Unit refused to investigate adulteration of poultry feed in Poland. The Association of Independent Meat Suppliers feared poultry reared on feed adulterated with “technical fats” or lubricant, would make its way to the UK market.
From the Animals Farmed series
More than 140 million birds have died and hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent in the past year in the US, UK and EU in tackling bird flu. With an international agreement on the use of vaccinations likely to be one or two years away, the situation will probably worsen this winter as outbreaks of the disease continue to rise.
China appears to be weakening its post-Covid restrictions on the farming of wildlife such as porcupines, civets and bamboo rats, which experts say raises a new risk to public health and biodiversity.
A court in Spain has acquitted a manager accused of sexual advances and using the threat of dismissal to demand sex, in a blow to a landmark legal challenge that sought to cast a spotlight on sexual abuse in the country’s meat processing industry. The behaviour was alleged to have taken place at an abattoir north of Barcelona.
A groundbreaking EU deal to ban the import of goods linked to deforestation has set a global benchmark and will hasten the passage of a similar law in the US, American lawmakers have said. A football pitch-sized tract of forest is lost every second somewhere around the world, mostly to agricultural expansion.
Finally, Vasilis Tsiolis has photographed the life of the Vlach herders in Greece and the Balkans, as they move livestock to high mountain pastures for the summer months. And, in Cumbria, Amy Bateman’s photographs of livestock farmers captured rural life during the Covid-lockdown.
Share your stories and feedback
Thank you to everyone who continues to get in touch to share their thoughts on the series.
Lynne Manning wrote to us about China’s 26-storey pig farm:
It is so wrong of humans to be able to do this. How can this be legal? That building and the property surrounding it are like a concentration camp for animals. The comfort and safety of these animals is nonexistent in this type of overcrowded and filthy building, with indifferent humans creating the absolute worst conditions for animals, and turning live, sentient beings into bacon.
Martin Monks responded to the feature about Greece’s nomadic herders to say:
Fascinating. But the Vlachs are not just Greek. Their language and culture was found all over the Balkans, and until modern times they roamed through Greece, Bulgaria and Romania without hindrance – it was, after all, all Ottoman land until the 19th century. The origin of the Vlach language is disputed but seems to derive from Latin through Romanian. Sad if that has been lost in favour of the national languages.
Please do send your stories and thoughts to us at: animalsfarmed@theguardian.com.
