Day 106 - 23 Mar 95 - Page 41
1 the problem), what they are trying to do with their
2 systems, and some of their electronic monitoring systems
3 are very sophisticated, very clever stuff, although those
4 created problems in their own respect, is they are trying
5 to mitigate or reduce the central problem of mass
6 production.
7
8 Now, the contrast illustrates the difference. You take a
9 small farm doing a small number of birds in discrete
10 batches which are killed on farm and the contamination is
11 limited to that which is on the farm. But an enormous site
12 like this is taking in birds from many, many farms with
13 varying rates of initial infection, there are accumulating
14 them together, sharing the contamination.
15
16 As we have seen from the figures, you start off with live
17 bird infection levels way below 1 per cent, or at
18 1 per cent, and it is coming out the other end at 25 per
19 cent. So, the scale of the operation is the central
20 problem in that it magnifies the contamination through the
21 system and everything else is really addressed at trying to
22 control the problems created by the nature and the style of
23 the building.
24
25 You see the gleaming stainless steel, the electronics, the
26 control systems, the temperature control, are all directed
27 at that, and you can walk around and you can say: "Yes, in
28 superficial terms it looks hygienic"; you could, say, go
29 into a little farmer who is doing a dozen turkeys in a barn
30 with an old door set on straw bales and just doing those 10
31 turkeys, and you would say: "That is unhygienic; you
32 cannot possibly sit in a barn and use that", but he could
33 produce a better standard because you have not got the
34 concentration effect, because if his 10 turkeys came into
35 that barn without salmonella, without campylobacter,
36 without E.coli 0157, or what-have-you, they would go out of
37 that barn without it. You cannot invent it; it is not
38 something that spontaneously materialises. But, put those
39 ten birds into this type of plant, and mix it with all the
40 other birds and the chances are that you are going to get
41 the stuff coming out the other end contaminated, so that is
42 the essential point. It is not what was visible, it is not
43 what the systems are; it is the nature of the plant that
44 I felt is the problem.
45
46 I believe you have my paper from the New Scientist in 1976,
47 I forecast it then, with the then 1976 Poultry and Hygiene
48 Regulations. The net effect of the Regulations was to
49 close down small producers, small processing plants, and
50 concentrate the industry into these very few, very large
51 plants, thereby increasing the amount of contamination,
52 magnifying the contamination through the system, ending up
53 with highly contaminated product going into the food
54 chain.
55
56 So, these in that context of both my statements is the
57 essence of the problem; it is the scale of the operation
58 and the way the mass production is concentrating on a few
59 plants which create the hygiene problem and, in that sense,
60 that carefully explained sense, the operation is
