I took this picture recently of a chicken farm in Staffordshire. What is so noticeable is this green tin shed with no windows and natural light but it is surrounded by empty grass fields. What we know is to keep chickens in these clinical sheds requires a huge amount of husbandry and chemical interventions to stop disease and animals injuring each other. Not forgetting that in food processing history this is one of the cruellest ways to treat an animal.
It does not need to be this way. Allowing chickens to roam around a fields and forage is not only good for the environment but also for the chicken and the consumer as the meat is likely to taste as it used to. So why be so cruel to a creature that for the sake of a few more pennies and field fencing can roam around for its short life, and actually provide a better end product without the need for extreme chemical and medical interventions. Well its pure Greed nothing more nothing less. The farmers have no regard for consumers health and actually neither do the government body DEFRA because they provide a license for chicken factories to exist.
A normal chicken will start to lay eggs at around 16 weeks and carry on for 2 to 3 years producing roughly an egg a day. A factory farm chicken is pumped full or antibiotic due to the unnatural conditions they are kept in and killed at 10 to 12 weeks having never touched soil or eaten grubs or worms.
We know the average family throws away £1000 a year in out of date food and spend on average £1600 on take-away and fast food. So Supermarkets and Manufacturers saying they have to do this because the consumer demands cheap food. But if we had to pay a little more for corn fed chicken that had lived a happy life scratching around in a fields fertilizing the land naturally, isn’t it worth it.
So what would you prefer to feed to your family and chicken that has lived a life and taste like they used to or a chemically produced chicken that has had a cruel life and is full of chemical and antibiotic.
Its not a difficult choice so if you want to help buy corn fed chicken from a local market and butchers and avoid supermarket chicken.
