Day 090 - 16 Feb 95 - Page 54
1 to farmers for spreading on the land.
2
3 Q. I understand, but has that always been so?
4 A. That has always been the case.
5
6 Q. I would just like to get it straight. I want to put this
7 in my notebook as well. When you say "Sun Valley" do you
8 just mean your own farms or the contractors as well?
9 A. I am referring to our contractors as well.
10
11 Q. That is poultry environment/index.html">litter then?
12 A. Yes.
13
14 Q. Poultry meat and bonemeal, which presumably includes offal?
15 A. Yes.
16
17 Q. Tell me about that? Has there been a change in the
18 situation with regard to that?
19 A. The change in the situation is that the company took
20 that ingredient out of its poultry rations around 1992.
21
22 Q. But poultry meat and bonemeal which has come from your
23 plant can still go to feed other animals, can it?
24 A. Yes, that would be sold to an independent operator who
25 could do what he wished with it.
26
27 Q. So it could go to feed other poultry in fact or cattle or
28 pigs?
29 A. That is possible.
30
31 Q. That is not your poultry but other poultry somewhere?
32 A. That is correct.
33
34 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes, I understand. Thank you.
35
36 MS. STEEL: Did you have a specification to prevent the selling
37 of poultry environment/index.html">litter for use as animal feed?
38 A. We do not have a specification as such. What we do as
39 a company is we provide a service to our contracted
40 growers. We provide a manager and in fact two people who
41 actually find markets for the poultry environment/index.html">litter. They find
42 farmers who want to use it for spreading on the land.
43 There is nothing in the contract to say that a farmer
44 contracted to Sun Valley cannot do what he wishes with the
45 poultry environment/index.html">litter, but most of them make use of the service
46 where we supply it to other farmers for spreading on the
47 land. In fact, many of the growers spread their own environment/index.html">litter
48 on their own land because they are mixed farmers with
49 several different enterprises.
50
51 Q. So, in fact, Mr. Thomas could have been, for example,
52 selling his poultry environment/index.html">litter for use in animal feed?
53 A. He could have done that. There is nothing we could have
54 done to stop him, no.
55
56 Q. Is there a problem with the disposal of offal and other
57 such things?
58 A. There is a big problem since the BSE scare in disposing
59 of meat and bonemeal from all species. I understand that a
60 lot of it is actually exported now.
