Captain Canada Champions Chicken

“If God keeps me, I will make sure that no peasant in my realm will lack the means to have a chicken in the pot on Sunday!” - King Henry IV of France (1553 - 1610)

Here we are, 413 years later, and many Canadians can only hope for the return of Good King Henry's ideals.

The Salvation Army sponsored the April 2011 survey of Canadians by Angus Reid.  This survey found that 22% of Canadians had received help from a food bank or a charity.  When you look at those who earned $50,000 per year or less, 36% of those people had received help from a food bank or a charity.

I see a linkage here between locally produced, affordable food and Small Flockers.  Once Small Flockers are able to break the Canadian chicken monopoly, everybody will have the right to produce poultry for themselves, their family, and neighbours.  Once that has been achieved, prices should become more and more affordable.

US Government poultry advertisement during World War I (1914-1918)

I attended the Manitoulin Community Food Network meeting this week to make a short presentation about Small Flock Poultry Farming. I was pleased with the reception I received.  I was also quite impressed with this dynamic group meeting of 14 people, making a difference for local food.

The advertisement on the left was from 1917, and is as true today as it was then.

Perhaps we can get Captain Canada to re-issue a new version of this ad for us today.






Feel free to lift anything from this Blog, print it out, and give it to a neighbour or a local community group, hopefully sparking a conversation about these issues for your community.

What will Maple Leaf Foods do?

Now that we have passed the word on arsenic being added to chicken feed (see this Blog posting), lets find out what we've been eating in Canada over the last little while.  Maple Leaf Foods is one of the "big boys" in the Canadian chicken market.  Let's see what they have to say.

Dear Maple Leaf Foods:

I understand that arsenic has been fed to some commercially raised chickens since the 1940's but this practice has now been banned in Canada as of Aug 2012.

Was there arsenic in the feed for any of the chicken previously sold under the Maple Leaf brand?

If yes, when did Maple Leaf (and/or your suppliers) stop adding arsenic to the chicken feed?

Has Maple Leaf fully implemented the ban on arsenic in chicken feed?

How can you be sure that the arsenic ban has been 100% implemented for Maple Leaf chicken?  For example, have you done independent sampling and testing for arsenic?

I sent the above inquiry to Maple Leaf Foods through their website as of 12:15 PM 2013/04/05.

What do you think Maple Leaf Foods'  response will be?

Do you think:

• they will ignore it
• threaten legal action
• claim proprietary trade secrets, so they can't talk about it
• respond in a fully open and honest manner
• send SWAT undercover para-miltary types to have a heart-to-heart discussion with me
• something else

Fill the Blog with your ideas.

Whoever has the first posting with the most correct answer will win a small, insignificant prize and world-wide Blog fame.

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing?

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

I received some interesting feedback about Small Flockers, this Blog, and our case that we are pressing for change.

This person felt that I was attempting to improperly link our cause with the issue of food security.

While that was all that was quickly said, I assume there is much more behind what was said.  I assume the feelings run much deeper, if not in just this person's mind, perhaps in the minds of many others.

Perhaps someone out there thinks that the Small Flocker's have attempted to improperly disguise our purpose, to dupe the public, and to hide behind the sacrosanct issue of food security.

A few weeks ago, another person said they were not willing to sign the petition, and were not willing to promote the petition to other persons because petitions are not a proper way for people to voice their opinions, people often sign them without understanding what they say, and will often sign just to escape an uncomfortable request to do so.

Is Small Flockers' acting as a wolf in sheep's clothing, improperly hiding its selfish cause within the virtuous food security issue?

That sounds like an interesting debate.  Perhaps we can actually get some dialogue going on this Blog.  Perhaps I'm acting as a Troll to have raised this issue at this time and place.

Perhaps this issue will be the catalyst that causes our faithful Blog Dogs to change from lurking readers to active participants.  Now's your chance to blast Small Flockers out of the sky.  The door is open, come on in.  Operators are standing by to receive your comments.

Trace Your Chicken

I will tell you a tale of two worlds for Ontario chicken.

CFO wants secrecy.

Small Flock Poultry Farmers ("Small Flockers") believe in openness and accountability.

CFO wants to protect the un-knowable secrets surrounding factory chickens.

Small Flockers want to provide full disclosure, provided in writing to each and every customer.

CFO is afraid of consumers learning about the Frankenstein drug injections into fertilized eggs that will eventually hatch, grow, and become your Sunday roast chicken dinner.

Small Flockers believe that injecting drugs and chemicals into fertilized eggs is an abomination, isn't necessary, is a tell-tale sign of major problem in CFO's systems, and shouldn't be permitted.

CFO wants you to keep buying their imitation chicken products, so they won't tell you about the drugs and chemical fed to the chickens they want you to buy and eat.

Small Flockers believe that proper housing and care for their poultry will minimize or eliminate the need for all or most drugs and chemicals in the poultry feed.  If the birds become ill, they will be treated using known, approved, and safe animal husbandry methods, or euthanized.

CFO whispers behind close doors about the strange and questionable occurrences during the short 56 day life of the factory chicken you will soon eat (from day-old chick to neck-meets-knife at the slaughter plant).

Small Flockers want to protect their birds from predators (eg. foxes, coyotes, etc.), then provide them a low-stress, high quality life in a clean, healthy environment that is as close to natural conditions as can occur.

CFO is pie-eyed and embarrassed when they see what happens to their live birds at the slaughter plant and beyond.

Small Flockers want to control the entire process, from day-old chicks to finished meat in the refrigerator, ready for sale.  If there is a problem, the customers knows who is responsible.

Small Flockers has drafted a Chicken Full Disclosure Form and submitted it to OMAF (Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food) for their review and approval.  This form provides full disclosure to customers buying chicken meat at the farm gate.  This form is filled out based on my farm, so other Small Flockers may show different results.

With this form, customers know everything about the meat they are considering for purchase.  It covers the parent rooster & hen who laid the eggs, the hatching of those eggs, and the entire life of the chicken, from chick to a full-sized adult chicken, as well as the details about when and how the bird was slaughtered.

For those of you with Smart Phones, you can access that same info from your smart phone with the following QR Code:

QR Code for Internet link to
Prototype Small Flocker Chicken
Traceability Full Disclosure Form

The above square of "random" black and white squares is called a QR code, the latest thing for smart phones to quickly get info on something.  Take a picture of this QR code with a smart phone, and your phone can decode whatever it says.  In this case, it leads to the same link as the Chicken Full Disclosure Form above, which is the same as the following hyperlink on the Internet.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cwmujds40pb71b8/FarmGateFoodSafetyPlan_A03_BBay.pdf

What works for Small Flockers could also work for CFO.  Here is what I propose:


In this case, the above QR Code is encoded for a non-existent web page at CFO's website that some day may provide full disclosure on a specific batch of chicken, from a specific chicken factory, that was processed at a specific slaughter plant, on a particular day, which CFO has defined at Batch # Z6a1G2H3k8H0f2

The QR code does the same thing as this hyperlink to the same place, except no typing required:
http://cfo.on.ca/trace/Z6a1G2H3k8H0f2

This QR code could follow the chicken everywhere it goes, from factory farm to meat display case at your friendly neighbourhood grocery store.  The labels can be stuck onto every package of chicken at the slaughter plant, or scanned off the bulk container, then printed on the store's custom label.

If you see that label on a chicken for sale, you can scan the QR code and know EVERYTHING about that chicken, before you buy.  If you don't like what you read on the total disclosure for that chicken, you can pass it by.

Perhaps one day, the grocery store will have a terminal by the meat counter where consumers can access a computer database that has all the products in that store.  You can search for the various features you seek, for example:  non_GMO, non-organic, processed by anybody except that infamous slaughter plant that you saw in the news last night as having another food recall AGAIN!  The terminal shows you 3 selections available that meet your criteria, 2 fresh, 1 frozen.  You choose the frozen, and it shows you there are 23 of those items still in stock at Aisle 7, Casement 4B, and a map showing where to walk in the store to pick up your prize selection.

That is power for the consumer.  Small Flockers think CFO should consider that possible solution.

That's why CFO sees Small Flockers as very dangerous and scary, for Small Flockers want to empower the consumer.

CFO wants to keep consumers as un-educated chicken slaves.

That's why this will never happen until the consumers rise up and force the government to force CFO to follow new rules, a new philosophy for food.

It's that simple.  The choice is yours, consumers.

Choose: Frankenstein Chicken, or Naturally Raised Chicken?

Arsenic, banned antibiotics, antihistamines, Prozac anti-depressants, caffeine, and Tylenol.  Why are commercially produced chickens being fed these chemicals and drugs?

Click on the cartoon for a full size version.

Farmer: "For maximum profit, I need maximum growth.  You won't eat if you're asleep or sick, so you're getting caffeine to stay awake, Gravol to stop caffeine jitters, plus antibiotics, painkillers, and anti-depressants.  That should cover it."  Hens: "That shot he gave me yesterday made me sick as hell!".  Other Hens: "We need something to keep us alive if we're going to be living in our own manure".  Other Hens: "It's OK guys, it will all be over in 6 weeks".  Baby Chicks: "No thank-you.  I prefer to be organic!"
Thanks to Murray Stenton and his help illustrating these important issues

The big factory chicken producers must think it helps their profitability, or they wouldn't do it.

Is CFO (Chicken Farmers of Ontario) aware of what is going on in the Ontario mega commercial chicken factories?  Do they care, or purposely turn a blind eye to these risks and mis-guided efforts to maximize profits?

Arsenic
Arsenic in food and drink can be a big problem, causing poisoning and cancer.

In spite of arsenic being a known acute poison, 3-Nitro® (Roxarsone), NADA 005-414, a drug used for agricultural feeds for chicken and pork, was approved by the FDA on March 21, 1944. There have been several subsequent approvals for 3-Nitro® (Roxarsone) for combination use, the most recent being 2009.  Later, arsenic was found to be a carcinogen, yet the FDA continued to allow it to be used in animal feeds as Big Ag could earn more profits if they used arsenic.

In May 2006, Health Canada lowered the Canadian Drinking Water Quality Guidelines to 10 ug/L (millionth of a gram per litre) based on recent information on the carcinogenicity of ingested arsenic.

Bacteria are hurt by arsenic too.  That is why arsenic has been shown to prevent infections in the high density, cheek to jowl chicken factories.  Adding arsenic to chicken feed causes a 4.1% greater weight gain due to metabolic disturbances created in the chicken.  So we risk poisoning people, or giving them cancer so as to gain 4.1% extra profit.  Thanks, chicken factory owners, we appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Arsenic also adds a nice pink colouring to the meat.  Consumer studies show that consumers can be fooled at the meat counter into buying poultry meat that has an eerie pink hue, as opposed to the whiter, non-arsenic chicken colour.

Note that free range chicken tends to be naturally more coloured, a colouration that is attempted to be copied by lacing the meats with arsenic.  Let's see, arsenic-laced or free range, is there a preference there you'd like to make as a consumer?

According to John Hopkin Bloomberg School of Public Health, the US EPA estimates that 70% of commercial chickens raised in the US were fed arsenic since the 1940's, and 80% market share for arsenic additives in animal feed are from Roxarsone brand organic arsenic.  Note that more than 10% of the chicken sold in Canada comes from the US.

In 1977, BC Broiler Marketing Board seized 40,000 kg of US chicken that was found to be laced with arsenic from Roxarsone in the chicken feed, declaring that Canadian chicken was better, and therefore US imports ought to be banned from Canada.

In Jan. 2007, Science News reported that bacteria in chicken litter are converting the organic arsenic residue in the chicken manure to inorganic arsenic, far faster than previously thought.  The inorganic arsenic dissolves into soils and surface water, and can then enter garden produce that was fertilized with arsenic contaminated chicken manure, and drinking water gets contaminated from farm runoff.  Inorganic arsenic is far more poisonous and carcinogenic than the organic arsenics that are fed to the chickens.

For example, on the Delmarva Peninsula (Delaware and portions of Maryland and Virginia) in the USA where 7% of the US chicken is produced, there are 600 million chickens raised per year which produce 1.5 billion kg of litter containing the chicken manure, which contain up to 50,000 kg/yr of poisonous arsenic, which then gets added to the local environment (ie. landfilled, or used as fertilizer to grow food).

Tyson, the world's largest chicken producer, stopped feeding arsenic in 2004 due to public furor about arsenic contaminated chicken meat.

In 2011, the manufacturer of Roxarsone voluntarily removed their product from the marketplace.  Canada banned roxarsone-type feed additives as of Aug. 8, 2012.  In July 2012, Maryland USA banned arsenical drugs and feed additives for chicken.

In 2012, US rice growers sued chicken farmers and drug companies for contaminating their rice crops with arsenic, where chicken manure was used as fertilizer.

In May 2013, John Hopkins Bloomfield School of Public Health published a study of chicken meat taken from across the US.  In spite of the legal requirement for factory chicken producers to withdraw arsenic-laced feeds sufficiently before slaughter so as to detoxify the meat, John Hopkins found significant levels of residual arsenic in the retail chicken meat samples.   They estimated that the arsenic residues would likely cause 3.7 additional incidents of bladder and/or lung cancer per 100,000 people exposed.

Remember how Canadian Chicken Marketing Boards seized arsenic-laced US chicken back in 1977 (see above)?  Oh, how times change.  If you can't beat them, you join them.  Apparently many, or a majority of Canadian factory chicken farmers followed the US lead, and have been feeding arsenic, antibiotics, and other drugs to Canadian chickens so as to obtain additional profit for themselves.

On August 8, 2012, Health Canada's ban on the addition of arsenic to chicken feed finally went into effect.

On Jan. 15, 2015 the FDA finally admitted that 70% of chicken in the US contained elevated arsenic residue from adding arsenic drugs to the chicken's feed or water.

So now that we know of their evil ways, does CFO ensure that Ontario chicken factories are in compliance with the recent roxarsone arsenic ban?  Did CFO test samples from Ontario chicken factories to ensure there is no cheating? Arsenic residues occur in the bird's feathers, manure, and liver, so its easy to collect samples to ensure compliance.  If not, why not?  You can ask CFO yourselves.  Email CFO about Arsenic

I put the same questions to CFC (Chicken Farmers of Canada).  Are you paying attention, finally?  Are you testing?  Canadian lives and health are at stake!  CFC has a website where consumers can directly ask CFC these tough questions.

Is CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) also checking?  If not, why not?

Banned Antibiotics
Antibiotics are fed to animals, even when they aren't clinically sick, because it maximizes the weight gain.  Unfortunately, those same antibiotics cause super-bugs that are drug resistant, and drug residues in the meat medicate the consumer without their knowledge.  Some antibiotics that are critical to treating human disease have therefore been banned from use in animals.

In the 12 samples tested, six different classes of antibiotics were present, with between 2 to 10 different antibiotics in each sample.  Antibiotic residues were present in 100% of the samples taken.  In spite of the banning of animal use of antibiotics reserved only for human use, we now learn that chickens are being fed banned fluoroquinolones (such as Ciprofloxacin).

Note that WHO and CDC feels we are on the verge of losing effective use of most antibiotics due to the excessive use in animal.  More than 85% of all antibiotics produced in North America are used on animals, just 15% go to human use.  Antibiotics for animals is BIG business.

Caffeine
When a bird is sleeping, it isn't eating.  If you keep the birds awake longer, they grow faster, and the chicken quota boys make more money.  Hence, chickens are fed caffeine so as to keep them awake, so they keep eating and grow faster.

Caffeine was found in 100% of the samples tested.

Anxiety
If you ever drank too much coffee or too many energy drinks, you probably suffered from shaky hands and having your nerves on edge.  It a similar effect for chickens.  Nervous birds don't grow as fast, and are subject to falling sick. Stressed birds produce tough meat. If a person gets motion sickness, doctors sometimes prescribe Benadryl (antihistamines) to calm the person, thereby avoiding the nausea.  If you want to feed caffeine to grow your chickens faster, and you have over-stressed birds due to un-natural living conditions in your chicken factory, then you also have to feed antihistamines and/or Prozac-type anti-depressants.  Guess what, that's just what chicken factories do to maximize their profits.

Pain Medications
Acetaminophen (Tylenol's active ingredient) is probably fed to help birds survive the high density living conditions and the disease risks.  If your not feeling well, you tend to eat less, and heaven forbid that from affecting chicken factory profits.  Tylenol-like pain medication helps your suffering chickens to feel better, and keep eating.

Giving birds paracetamol (Tylenol-like drugs) can keep an avian flu infected bird going long enough to get them to the slaughter plant.

Canada's Position on Feeding Antibiotics   From CFIA
"World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) identified the fight against antimicrobial resistance as one of its priorities for 2012. The OIE also advocated for good veterinary control of the registration, import, distribution and on-farm use of antimicrobials."

"The OIE’s call for better control of antimicrobials echoes last year’s statement from the World Health Organization (WHO), which warned that the world is on the brink of losing these “miracle cures” due to the emergence and spread of drug-resistant pathogens."

"Macrolides and tetracyclines are often incorporated into feed for growth promotion or disease prevention, and fluoroquinolones and cephalosporins are frequently used to treat and prevent infections. Pathogens and commensal organisms resistant to these drugs in animals can be transmitted to humans, and the management of animal health then becomes a human health issue. The reverse can also be true."

After writing this Blog post, I am sick with a feeling of just how far mega chicken factories have wandered away from the natural order of things.  They are so far over the horizon, it is doubtful if they will ever find their way back to reality.

Fortunately, small flock poultry farmers stand at the ready to fill the gap created by the on-going mistakes of the arrogant, never admit to a mistake, mega chicken factory quota-boys.

Sources
 For more information, see the following:

May 12, 2005 Environmental Health Perspectives "Arsenic: A Roadblock to Animal Waste Management Solutions"

Oct. 2008 Ann N Y Acad Sci., "The environmental and public health risks associated with arsenical use in animal feeds"

April 4, 2012 New York Times, Arsenic in Our Chicken?

Mar. 21, 2012 Environmental Science & Technology, "Feather Meal: A Previously Unrecognized Route for Reentry into the Food Supply of Multiple Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs)