Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Darren Jones

Monday 12th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

I thank the Members staying for my Adjournment debate this evening at the early hour of 11 pm.

For those of us who like to be clear about definitions, I should start by making it clear that my Adjournment debate today is on intensive farming operations in the United Kingdom. I say this because concentrated animal feeding operations has a legal definition that is used in the United States but is also relevant to this debate. In the United States, concentrated animal feeding operations describe farms over a certain size that farm animals in extreme confinement. We do not have an equivalent definition in the United Kingdom, but we do have intensive farming of animals, which is defined by the Environment Agency as a farm housing at least 40,000 birds or 2,000 pigs. This form of intensive farming increased in the UK by a quarter in the six years running up to 2017.

As reported in The Guardian newspaper, a recent investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that we now have a large number of intensive farming operations in the UK, many of which would meet the definition of concentrated animal feeding operations used in the United States. These so-called megafarms have at least 125,000 birds for meat, or 82,000 birds for eggs, 2,500 pigs, 700 dairy cattle or 1,000 beef cattle. We now have 789 megafarms in the UK, according to that investigation.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

We know that there are many more megafarms in the United States. Does my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour share my concern that if we open our markets to lower-standard imports from the US post Brexit, our farmers will feel that they have no choice but to move to megafarming in order to compete on price?

[Darren Jones]

I agree entirely. I do not think British consumers will accept that position, not least because they enjoy the high-quality standards that we expect of many of our food producers in the UK. If that is exerting a pressure on home-grown produce, they will not accept it either.

Seven of the 10 largest poultry farms in this country already have a capacity to house more than 1 million birds, with the biggest farm holding up to 23,000 pigs and the largest cattle farm 3,000 cattle. These are all numbers, but to give an example to the House, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism study showed that a megafarm in Herefordshire had four 110-metre by 20-metre industrial warehouses, each with 42,000 chickens in them. There were so many chickens in these warehouses that the journalists could not see the floor. These chickens live for only a short period, and the process is repeated up to eight times each year, so that is a turnover of over 1 million birds every year in these confined settings.

These conditions are bad for animals and bad for our food. Confinement can lead to the stress-related death of animals; self-mutilation of animals due to mental health conditions; ulcerated feet, breast blisters and hock burns due to ammonia-filled litter; sudden death syndrome from unnaturally quick growth; foot and leg damage from slated or concrete floors; and in the case of lots of dairy cows, bacterial infection, mastitis, anaemia, stomach ulcers and chronic diarrhoea. These are not things consumers wish to have associated with the food they eat. As a consequence, I will be writing to Tesco, Sainsbury, the Co-operative, Marks and Spencer, Morrisons, Asda, McDonald’s and Nando’s, all of which, I am told, buy the products I am talking about for their customers.

These stressful, illness-inducing environments also lead to the excessive use of antibiotics in animal feed and water to try to limit the risk of disease from intensive farming settings. According to Compassion in World Farming, there is strong evidence that the overuse of antibiotics in animals is contributing to the antibiotic resistance we are now seeing in human medicine—something this country is, thankfully, working hard to try to prevent.

To make matters worse, these extreme farming conditions can lead animals to become stressed. Again, that is bad for food, but it is also bad for animals. I am told that stress-induced aggressive animal behaviours have led to chickens being de-beaked, which involves a hot blade cutting through a bird’s beak, bone and soft tissue. Chicken toes are also removed to discourage fighting, and the tails of pigs and cows are removed to prevent tail biting. Again, these are conditions I am sure many British consumers would not want associated with the food on their plates.

However, this is not just about the quality of food or the quality of animal welfare; it is also about the environment and our efforts at tackling climate change. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said we have 12 years to limit post-industrial levels of world temperature growth to 1.5° C—the subject of a separate debate I will be leading at 9.30 tomorrow morning in Westminster Hall.