Chicken Traceability

Traceability for our food is terrible to non-existant.  There is better traceability for auto parts than food.  Small Flock Poultry Farmers of Canada ("SFPFC") leads the way to a new world standard for poultry traceability.  We challenge all other food suppliers to duplicate our solution and follow us, if they dare.

Figure 1:   Label on the chicken sold Farm Gate from my farm.
Click on the image for a full size version.  This label provides consumers full
disclosure on their chicken, from hatching to consumer's fork.  The Internet
link (in this case http://blacksbay.com/farm/flocks/BBF201510002.pdf ) and
the scannable QR Code both give the URL containing all the farmer's info
on these chickens.  Scan the QR code with your Smart Phone, or click
on the link and see how it works; instant disclosure at your fingertips.

If you have a QR code on a food label like that shown in Figure 1 for my farm, you can:

• Scan the QR code using the camera on your Smart phone using a free App on your phone (eg. a Barcode Scanner from GooglePlay or equivalent), or
  
   
• Use WebQR (using your desktop or laptop webcam); or
  
   
• ZXing (crawls a web page looking for an on-line QR code)

Farmers can also hand out hard copies of the document.  However consumers get to the traceability & disclosure document, they can now get full disclosure on the chicken they are thinking of buying.  If done by the Chicken Mafia, that freedom to choose well can be done right at the grocery store meat counter.

Eventually, consumer advocacy groups may pour over the detailed disclosure documents and rank chicken suppliers (eg. Green, Yellow, Red), or the Top Ten for a region, Province, or Canada overall.  This can help consumers quickly decide if they should buy, or keep walking along the grocery store aisle.

Too Much Information?

Some consumers don't want to know the squishy details of what happens to chickens as they grow, and especially when they go to slaughter.  For their sensitivities, too much info makes the meat impossible to eat.  For them, the funny QR code on the label can be safely ignored and put out of mind.  All they have to do is follow the herd (ie. the rest of their family and neighbours) who have done the detailed research and discovered the best chicken to buy.  The sensibilities of the sensitive are protected.

Farmer's Overhead & Paperwork

 Will this proposed system add unfair burdens to small farmers.  I've done it, and believe it is easily managed by all.  The steps are as follows:

Step #	Step Description	Man-hrs	Expenses, $	Total, $
1	Become a member of SFPFC, and obtain a free copy of SFPFC's disclosure & traceability form, and the MS Publisher meat label template.	0.25	1.00	3.50
2	Fill in the form &/or customize the form for your farm	1.5	0.00	15.00
3	Upload the disclosure document to your farm’s website.  If you don’t have your own website, obtain a free Dropbox.com account (or equivalent) and upload completed disclosure form.  Get the link to your document to share with the world.	0.5	0.00	5.00
4	Use http://goog.le to create short URL, then a QR code image to that shortened URL.  Copy the QR code image to your computer.	0.25	0.00	2.50
5	Place the QR code on the label you will apply to your chickens for sale.  Paste the original URL link into the label.  Print enough labels to apply to all your chickens.	0.5	0.00	5.00
TOTALS		3.0	1.00	31.00

The above costs and steps are in addition to the current chicken labeling system of today.  Assuming $10/hr labor rate, if a farmer is producing 300 chickens per year as a Small Flocker, assuming 2.2 kg birds, this traceability system adds $0.047 per kg to the cost of your chicken.  If you are an Artisanal Chicken farmer under CFO's new program, this disclosure form adds $0.0047 per kg. to your costs. If a chicken factory farmer is producing 200,000 birds per year, the farm gate price must rise by $0.00007 per kg.

Once a farmer has done this for their first flock, it becomes much faster & easier for all subsequent flocks to copy & paste the info.

While I am all for reducing overhead as much as possible, to me, this seems to be a reasonable and affordable cost, with huge benefits for consumers.

Canada's Chicken Mafia

Due to a marketing opportunity, CFC and CFO have adopted a "Canadian grown chicken" trademark, but refuse to provide any additional information.  By carefully reading the package, you can find where the chicken was slaughtered, but that the end of the info consumers are permitted to know.  Big national brands market the chicken, but hide which farms were contracted to grow that chicken.  They pretend that all farms, all farmers, and all chicken are identical; a fungible commodity like salt, sugar, and wheat.

Of course, the fossilized multi-millionaire chicken factory owners currently enjoy their secrecy and information vacuum, and don't want educated consumers.  They buy media time to spew their marketing propaganda.  Generalities and platitudes work well when consumers are sleeping and unduly trust their food suppliers.  That is why they have done nothing ever since I originally proposed improved chicken traceability way back in April 2013 (see Blog Posting Trace Your Chicken ).

While propaganda as summarized by Edward Bernays in 1928 was a powerful tool used by the Nazi's Minister of Propaganda Goebbels, and for other evil purposes, it isn't all powerful.  When given a voice, the truth can expose and destroy any propaganda.  I doubt that the Chicken Mafia is more powerful and devious than the Nazis regime.

False Documents

Just because a document happens to state something, it doesn't make it so.  Fraudsters well understand the power of false documents.  However any document is better for consumers than an information vacuum.  Once a document exists, that document can be checked for ambiguities, comprehensiveness, supporting and collaborating evidence from trusted sources, and other evidence or verification.  If a document is found to be silent, ambiguous, or lack comprehensiveness, consumers can complain or refuse to buy.  The complaints and lost sales can continue increasing until the supplier responds by improving the traceability and disclosure document.  Once started, the document can be improved, and then improved some more as customers compare between their current supplier and a better supplier.

If a supplier dares to issue a false or misleading document, the document (and its issuer) will eventually be found out.  At that point, we have a criminal and/or civil offense that can be prosecuted, initiated by a complaint by a government official, a competitor of the fraudster, or a consumer.  A documented traceability and disclosure system can be self policing.

The current vacuum of information can never self police.

Small Flockers Lead The Way

I now have about 400 lbs of chicken, duck, and goose meat for sale to interested persons in my small Northern Ontario community using this traceability system.  With time, I hope other chicken farmers come join me.  If you are a member of SFPFC, you can get a free copy of the form to customize it to your farm.  SFPFC membership has its privileges and advantages!

I believe this proposed traceability is in the best interest of consumers, and is therefore in the long term best interest of chicken producers.

How long will the CFO chicken fossils resist and fight against this trend?

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.