AFP – Stephane Dahirel doesn’t exactly say eat chicken and save the planet but that is what he’s hinting at as he opens a shed door at his intensive farm in Brittany, western France.
The 90,000 broilers – chickens bred for their meat – flapping around inside his three sheds, will more than triple in size in less than a month and their meat will have a low carbon footprint.
“The objective is to produce the best meat possible, in the least amount of time, with the least amount of food,” Dahirel said.
The two million snow-white chickens he produces every year – bred mostly for McDonald’s nuggets – will reach their slaughter weight in less than half the time it takes on a traditional farm.
At 20 days they already weigh one kilogrammes (kg) – 20 times heavier than at birth. By the time they are slaughtered at 45 days, they will weigh over 3kg.
Chicken has the smallest carbon footprint of any meat, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
Their latest figures reveal that chicken generates on average less than 1kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilo of meat – beef produces 52 times the emissions thanks to cows’ potent methane burps.
Dahirel insisted that intensive farming is the most efficient and rational system for producing meat from an economical and ecological perspective.
But there are big drawbacks too. Despite the low emissions he claims for his chickens, producing the grain to feed them requires large amounts of land, synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.
All have effects on biodiversity and water quality. Indeed green algae blooms on beaches in Dahirel’s native Brittany – partly caused by intensive poultry and dairy production – has caused an environmental outcry and been linked to several deaths.
Intensive farming is also in the dock on animal well-being. Dahirel raises 20 chickens per square metre (20 chickens per 10 square feet), which are kept on a litter where droppings are absorbed by wood shavings and buckwheat hulls.
Sick or abnormal chickens are killed to avoid further suffering and because the automated slaughterhouse requires a homogenous product. “They are not robots of course, but we’re looking for homogeneity,” the farmer said from his veranda overlooking one of his three sheds, covered in solar panels.
Chickens may be an optimal animal protein for carbon emissions, but not necessarily for nature, experts said.
“If we think only in terms of carbon dioxide emissions per kilo of meat, we’d all start eating chicken. But thinking that’s the solution would be a massive mistake,” said Pierre-Marie Aubert of France’s Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations France.
“If you only think in terms of carbon, a heap of things would backfire on us in the long run,” he added.
Aubert said there had been a crazy rise in consumption of chicken in recent years, making it one of the most widely consumed meats in the world.
The world has become so focused on methane emissions from ruminants like cattle and sheep “that many people think substituting beef with chicken is enough, but really, we need to reduce all meat consumption,” said Lucile Rogissart of the Institute for Climate Economics.
