Where are all the chickens?

[Thankyou4calling]

On Tuesday i took advantage of a fantastic deal in KFC.

9 pieces of finger lickin for £5.99. No chips, no beans, no slaw just chicken. It was lovely.

The place was heaving! Admittedly it was Earls Court Road in London but it got me thinking, that one shop has to get through a 1000 chickens a day.

Multiply that by the number of KFC's and all the other fast food joints that sell chicken, the numbers bought in supermarkets etc and I'm coming up with some crazy figures for how many chickens we consume as a nation each week.

I know i could google the answer but the point I'm making is WHERE ARE ALL THESE CHICKENS?

Is there a part of the UK where only chickens exist/ are they all shipped in for our consumption?

I'm being a bit tongue in cheek I know but there is a serious side to my question.

Gotta be a hell of a lot of chickens out there.

[Bill]

Thankyou4calling said:

out there.

You'd be amazed how small a shed you need.

[Truckosaurus]

They are all in massive barns rather than wandering around fields.

I believe they only have a lifespan of a couple of months before becoming a tasty bucket of KFC.

[TooMany2cvs]

750m chickens slaughtered in the UK each year, 94% intensively reared.

Here in Herefordshire, there's a lot of intensive chicken units. From the outside, they're just very large, very smelly sheds.

https://goo.gl/maps/hEouCUrReN12
https://goo.gl/maps/7SB1k2x38SM2
http://www.herefordtimes.com/news/14507266.Plannin...

EU limit - 42kg/m2, UK limit - 39kg/m2, Red Tractor - 37kg/m2 - 2.2kg/chicken = 17 chickens/m2. About a month before slaughter.

And they're not even among the nationally REALLY large units... The big ones get through over a million birds/year.

[Eddie Strohacker]

A friend of mine installs, fixes & upgrades egg sorting machines. There's only a handful of companies in the world who do this & as a result, he travels the world on a very good screw indeed.

He tells me of Chicken sheds housing birds as far as the eye can see. I guess if you're going to have seven billion people in the world, the way you farm stuff has to follow suit.

[bitchstewie]

I know your question is a bit tongue in cheek but they're just in places that aren't London.

The UK is pretty damned big when you think how relatively little space is needed.

I assume we import quite a lot too but not because we couldn't do it ourselves just because it's not our "industry".

[FredericRobinson]

Thailand, Brazil, etc etc

[TwigtheWonderkid]

I heard on the radio that if you applied inflation to the cost of a chicken in the 1930s, a chicken today would cost about £40. I think a whole chicken is about £4 in the supermarket.

I guess in those days chickens were reared on farms and had coups and were fed corn and treated with a modicum of decency. Labour intensive work.

[Einion Yrth]

TwigtheWonderkid said:

reared on farms and had coups

I say, that's a bit Orwellian.

[Driver101]

TwigtheWonderkid said:

I heard on the radio that if you applied inflation to the cost of a chicken in the 1930s, a chicken today would cost about £40. I think a whole chicken is about £4 in the supermarket.

I guess in those days chickens were reared on farms and had coups and were fed corn and treated with a modicum of decency. Labour intensive work.

It's £2.98 for a full chicken in Asda.

I find it incredible that is even possible.

[Pothole]

TooMany2cvs said:

750m chickens slaughtered in the UK each year, 94% intensively reared.

Here in Herefordshire, there's a lot of intensive chicken units. From the outside, they're just very large, very smelly sheds.

https://goo.gl/maps/hEouCUrReN12
https://goo.gl/maps/7SB1k2x38SM2
http://www.herefordtimes.com/news/14507266.Plannin...

EU limit - 42kg/m2, UK limit - 39kg/m2, Red Tractor - 37kg/m2 - 2.2kg/chicken = 17 chickens/m2. About a month before slaughter.

And they're not even among the nationally REALLY large units... The big ones get through over a million birds/year.

More than that according to Poultry World:

UK-production of poultry meat last year (2015) amounted to 1.69 million tonnes (MT), some 44,000 tonnes more than in 2014 and 132,000 tonnes more than 5 years ago, according to the Poultry Yearbook published by the research department of the levy board AHDB. Of this, 1.42 MT was chicken meat for which 975 million fowls were slaughtered. The figures show that British production of chicken has increased by some 25% since the beginning of the century.

[N Dentressangle]

Driver101 said:

It's £2.98 for a full chicken in Asda.

I find it incredible that is even possible.

It's only possible because everyone keeps schtumm and goes lalala about how these birds are farmed. It doesn't take much research to find out.

Aldi sell free range chicken for £5-6. That's hardly expensive, and no more than a factory farmed bird cost a few years ago.

I like eating meat, but I'd like it produced with a modicum of decency. I'd rather pay a bit more for better meat and eat a bit less of it, and avoid KFC etc altogether.

[TooMany2cvs]

Pothole said:

More than that according to Poultry World:

Not surprised.

[craigjm]

TwigtheWonderkid said:

I heard on the radio that if you applied inflation to the cost of a chicken in the 1930s, a chicken today would cost about £40. I think a whole chicken is about £4 in the supermarket.

I guess in those days chickens were reared on farms and had coups and were fed corn and treated with a modicum of decency. Labour intensive work.

Would taste a lot better thought I'm sure.

A great amount of cheap chicken for places like the 3 pieces for £2 brigade comes in from Thailand and Brazil etc and is raised in very poor condition and injected with water etc.

KFC is quite careful about what it says about its chicken. The following statements are from its website -

Our original recipe chicken on the bone is sourced from British and Irish farmers

All our chicken pieces are delivered to our restaurants daily and breaded and cooked fresh.

Sounds to me like you can assume if you are eating burgers, popcorn chicken or chicken strips within KFC that are therefore not on the bone that it's factory prepared and the chicken could come from anywhere

[anonymous-user]

FredericRobinson said:

Thailand, Brazil, etc etc

actually all kfc is fresh uk chicken 1.2-1.6 weight whole birds if i remember correctly. The wings are frozen, the rest fresh. the mini fillets through to the kfc is cut from chickens. there was a tail ends off the breast cuts used for kfc pop corn. There are 3-4 main suppliers in the uk, they birds live for around 30 days, cost about 1.5 per bird , retail about 1.7-2.0 pounds to kfc.

they are standard birds kept in big barns -50-100k chickens, standard plus have barns with windows, high welfare chicken are a different breed and given more space and better feed, usually waitrose,m and s birds.

[Thankyou4calling]

N Dentressangle said:

It's only possible because everyone keeps schtumm and goes lalala about how these birds are farmed. It doesn't take much research to find out.

Aldi sell free range chicken for £5-6. That's hardly expensive, and no more than a factory farmed bird cost a few years ago.

I like eating meat, but I'd like it produced with a modicum of decency. I'd rather pay a bit more for better meat and eat a bit less of it, and avoid KFC etc altogether.

Yeah. But 9 pieces for £5.99!

[wolfracesonic]

TwigtheWonderkid said:

I heard on the radio that if you applied inflation to the cost of a chicken in the 1930s, a chicken today would cost about £40. I think a whole chicken is about £4 in the supermarket.

I guess in those days chickens were reared on farms and had coups and were fed corn and treated with a modicum of decency. Labour intensive work.

Poultry based power struggles to see who has control of the coop?

[anonymous-user]

craigjm said:

Thailand and Brazil etc and is raised in very poor condition and injected with water etc.

KFC is quite careful about what it says about its chicken. The following statements are from its website -

Our original recipe chicken on the bone is sourced from British and Irish farmers

All our chicken pieces are delivered to our restaurants daily and breaded and cooked fresh.

Sounds to me like you can assume if you are eating burgers, popcorn chicken or chicken strips within KFC that are therefore not on the bone that it's factory prepared and the chicken could come from anywhere

What a loads of bks, you haven't a clue what you are talking about, injected with water, chicken that 'doesn't' come off the bone, i want to here that explanation.....

You sound like Alan Partridge talking about farmers.

[craigjm]

The Spruce goose said:

craigjm said:

Thailand and Brazil etc and is raised in very poor condition and injected with water etc.

KFC is quite careful about what it says about its chicken. The following statements are from its website -

Our original recipe chicken on the bone is sourced from British and Irish farmers

All our chicken pieces are delivered to our restaurants daily and breaded and cooked fresh.

Sounds to me like you can assume if you are eating burgers, popcorn chicken or chicken strips within KFC that are therefore not on the bone that it's factory prepared and the chicken could come from anywhere

What a loads of bks, you haven't a clue what you are talking about, injected with water, chicken that 'doesn't' come off the bone, i want to here that explanation.....

You sound like Alan Partridge talking about farmers.

Are you a farmer? Do you have any link to the meat industry? Do you know what the red tractor mark is for instance and what it does and doesn't allow? One of the things it doesn't allow is injection with water.

Where did I say "chicken that doesn't come off the bone"? You need to reread what I actually said. The KFC website is very careful that when it talks about chicken welfare it talks about "on the bone" chicken. It does not mention the welfare of the chicken used to make up burgers, popcorn and strips etc. Very subtle.

[anonymous-user]

craigjm said:

Are you a farmer? Do you have any link to the meat industry? Do you know what the red tractor mark is for instance and what it does and doesn't allow? One of the things it doesn't allow is injection with water.

Where did I say "chicken that doesn't come off the bone"? You need to reread what I actually said. The KFC website is very careful that when it talks about chicken welfare it talks about "on the bone" chicken. It does not mention the welfare of the chicken used to make up burgers, popcorn and strips etc. Very subtle.

Why do I have to be a farmer to know how the system works?

I was a production planner for a factory that killed 300k birds a day, we supplied kfc. The welfare of the meat that goes into the burgers is the same as the Whole Birds which are cut for the pieces, as i put earlier, standard. Which is a agreed poultry standard, so again you are talking a load of rubbish. The meat for pop corn is stripped from de-breasted caps through a machine made by baader which separates the breast meat off the cap.

The meat for fillets and strips is made from the breast caps and inner fillets.

Red tractor is probably the lowest standard for animal welfare, the birds still get between 20-40%
(can be as high as 75%) scouring on there legs (diarrhea left on the chicken legs shows up as black marks on the legs).

The birds are the same as in the supermarket offering by the main supermarkets they all come from the same broiler houses.