May 2, 2014

Vencomatic produces healthy and antibiotic-free chickens

Dutch company Vencomatic has built an experimental chicken facility outside the small town of Eersel in the Netherlands, where birds are healthier and grew faster to greater weights than the industry average but never received the routine administered antibiotics.

Peter Vingerling, an animal welfare expert who works for the Dutch company Vencomatic, opens a people-sized side door and flips on the lights. It might look like The Matrix for chickens, but it may actually represent the future of meat production. Since January 2008, Vencomatic has raised 1.26 million meat chickens in this warehouse. The birds were healthier and grew faster to greater weights than the industry average-but they never received the routinely administered antibiotics that have become a farm-policy flashpoint in both Europe and the US.

"We didn't design this in order to raise chickens without antibiotics," Vingerling tells me. "We did it to be sustainable and serve animal welfare. But then we noticed that, over a couple of years, we hadn't had to use any drugs at all."

Vencomatic's facility, the prototype of a system it calls "Patio," sits at the crossroads of two crucial issues in modern agriculture. There's an urgent push to get antibiotics out of livestock because the drugs create antibiotic resistant microbes that imperil human health.

Antibiotics have been an integral component of meat production since the late 1940s, when biologists working for a pharmaceutical firm decided to feed antibiotic-manufacturing residue to chickens. The chickens gained weight faster than expected, and almost all of modern meat-raising was founded on that discovery. In the US, chickens, pigs, and cattle now receive almost 30 million pounds of antibiotics per year-several times what humans are prescribed-and almost none of those drugs are used for disease treatment. Animals get antibiotics, instead, either to help them put on weight (probably because the drugs alter the balance of bacteria in their guts), or to prevent diseases that spread in the close quarters of intensive agriculture.

Using antibiotics as growth promoters was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the FDA's European counterparts in the early 1950s. Within a decade, medical authorities in all those countries started noticing that antibiotic-resistant infections in people were becoming more common. Research linked the occurrence of resistance to the use of agricultural antibiotics as early as the mid-1970s. But antibiotics make meat production less expensive-so when public health has pushed for farm use to be scaled back, organised agriculture has resisted.

The EU ended the debate in 2006 by simply banning all growth-promoter use, and some countries including the Netherlands have enacted tight restrictions on preventive uses as well. The US finally addressed growth promoters last December. But the controls created by the FDA-technically, a request that veterinary-pharma companies take "growth promotion" off their drugs' permitted uses, plus plans to make the drugs prescription-only-are voluntary.

Animal welfare campaigners say that extremely rapid growth, plus cross-breeding to produce more breast meat, is intrinsically bad for birds, creating chickens that can't fly, walk, or even stand for long. "Meat chickens' squalid conditions in factory farms, and especially their selective breeding for fast growth, leave them weak and sick, lying in their own waste, so the industry feeds them antibiotics to compensate," says Suzanne McMillan, senior director of farm animal welfare strategy for the ASPCA, which last year published a detailed critique of fast-growing chicken breeds.

Vencomatic's innovation was to hatch the birds where they will be raised. The company's first step was building a rack that positions ready-to-hatch eggs above the barn floor. When the chicks pop out, they tumble off the rack into their growing area and can eat and drink immediately. That might seem unremarkable, but it is actually rare. Broiler chicks aren't fed at a hatchery; they don't eat until they reach the farm where they will grow to chicken hood. The trip is supposed to happen soon after they emerge - but since chicks are hatched in large batches and don't all emerge at the same moment, some can wait two days for their first meal.

The Vencomatic system answers two of the three concerns for modern meat production. It eliminates the need for antibiotics by reducing stress and boosting the birds' immune systems. And it keeps volume high: The experimental facility raises 30,000 broilers at a time, and the company has sold larger versions that house up to 250,000 birds in a barn.