In the poultry business, the plant and production department enjoy a continuous and dynamic in-company client-provider relationship. Consequently, decisions made at the live production level may reflect directly on the plant's performance. These effects are not detected instantly. Most often, they are seen either further down from their moment of their origin or, even worse, when the live loads arrive at the plant, when it will be then too late to remediate eventual mistakes. For this reason, the relationship between live production and plant no longer can be managed as a plain interface between two secluded areas – production and plant – a misguided, but still common approach. Instead, their management requires a holistic approach as to deeply integrate them both to end up with production plus plant.
Communication channel
To be successful and productive, this integration requires the establishment of a strong and effective communication channel between the internal provider (live production) and its internal client (plant). All this in the context of an operational environment, where the live production department must be strategically oriented by the processing department's requirements, given it is the core business of any poultry processing company. Consequently, the performance and goals of the live production department does not have an end in themselves, but rather are the means to secure every day the raw material that fully accomplishes the plant's requirements, thus contributing to maximise its performance and company's bottom-line. In a figurative way, the live production department must spin the PDCA cycle, or Deming Cycle, every day – being fully aware of what the raw material's requirements are (planning); working hard to fulfil them all every day (doing); collecting feed-back from its internal client on the performance of the raw material through an open, pro-active communication channel (checking), and using this feed-back to upgrade the performance of the raw material (acting).
Safe final product
In fact, what are the plant's requirements? As to comply with the ever stringent and evolving markets' and clients' requirements, the plant needs raw material that was produced in compliance with animal welfare guidelines. That is healthy, but free of undesirable residues or contaminants; that is free of major skin and paws defects; that was grown to the specs, that underwent a consistent, trustable feed withdrawal programme and is capable to come up with a safe final product at the end of the line. Animal welfare has been consolidating its importance within the animal protein industry around the world to a point that it became a key-prerequisite to access some markets (domestic and overseas). The meat industry was first awaken from its latency towards the issue by means of the noisy, active and, sometimes even aggressive animal rights activists groups around the world, especially in the US and EU.
Two lessons
After the initial stupefaction and turbulence, the industry finally embraced the matter with devotion and seriousness, but just lately realising it could ripe significant economic benefits from the adoption of humanitarian practices in the handling of animals along the production and processing chains. It learned that nicely-cared broilers (and all the other meat animals) are more productive, thus cheaper to produce. Furthermore, they tend to present lesser defects in the carcass, therefore are less likely to salvaging and to produce downgrades, reducing losses while increasing saleable weight, competitiveness and profitability. These two lessons, which are of great economical relevance, as live broilers represent some 69% of the total processing costs, led the companies to give the animal welfare a strategic treatment, well demonstrated by recent actions from industry and governments around the world. In Canada, Maple Leaf, a leading animal processing conglomerate, recently appointed an animal wellness director; in Switzerland, Nestlé is working in partnership with World Animal Protection to improve and tighten its commitment to the Farm Animal Welfare programme. And in Germany, the government of Lower-Saxony, the leading broiler producing state, has introduced stricter animal welfare rules.
Matter of time
The world poultry industry has it clear in mind that their livestock's health is the number one priority. Without this, poultry companies would never be productive, competitive or profitable. Consequently having companies elbowed out of business, would be just a matter of time. However, the health of birds must be pursued and guaranteed no longer by means of excessive dependence on the (ab)use of antibiotics, whose impact on human health has been the core of inflamed, yet-inconclusive debates among industry, market players, society and government, but through sound production practices, preventive measures and trustable, consistent biosecurity programs, instead. This approach has been gaining important support around the world from leading chicken producing companies. Recently, Perdue, a US leading chicken company, after a 12-year long project, banned the use of antibiotic from the hatchery and claimed in its website that “across our company, 95% of our chickens never receive any human antibiotics. The remainder may receive them only for a few days when prescribed by a veterinarian”.
Skin quality leading
Likely unacceptable by consumers around the world is the presence of residues of any kind, especially the health-harmful ones, in the chicken meat and meat products ( Figure 1 ). The skin quality is determinant to the carcasses and parts grading. Therefore, its integrity will determine the percentage of salvage, for major defects, and the percentage of downgrades, for minor defects, which, altogether, will influence the volume of saleable weight and the production mix's profitability. The skin quality can be affected by several factors, like the increase of the placement density, which is rapid and cheap means to increase live production capacity, but also a proven cause of increase in the incidence of skin problems. Nutrition is another factor that has a lot to do with skin quality. The use or not of organic minerals, high or low energy feed and proper balance of amino acids, among other requirements, will determine, to an important extent, the feathering and strength of the broiler skin and, therefore, how the birds will cope with the house environment's challenges. Proper flock management prevents the shortage of water and feed, which is also a proven cause of skin problems, and feed restriction, usually associated with climate in some regions where controlled-environment houses are not a common resource, may impose some damages to the quality of the skin.Males are more susceptible to skin problems than females, thanks to their slower feathering, for being more aggressive and for crouching for a longer time than females. In Brazil, skin problems are among the top-five causes of partial condemnations of carcasses at the plant, with cellulitis and dermatitis being the two most important ones.