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

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