Perfect storm warning for poultry sector
Perfect storm warning for poultry sector
“We have all been reading about the drought in the USA knocking out much of the corn crop and hitting soya production. Couple this with a very slow start, reduced yields for the harvest in northern Europe due to prolonged heavy rain, a few climatic glitches elsewhere in the producing world and we have the ‘perfect storm’ of reduced supplies and dramatically high prices for grains, exacerbated by speculators,” warns Peter Bradnock, chief executive of The British Poultry Council.
“The impact on UK poultry feed costs over a year is currently an extra £0.5 billion. It could go higher. On a total annual feed bill of around £1.4 billion on January 2012 prices for wheat and soya, this is a 36% jump. It may be ‘chicken feed’ but an increase of this size is impossible to swallow through increased efficiency. The main bulk of this increased feed cost lands in the poultry meat production chain.”
You can read more about Peter’s concerns in the September/October issue of Meat Management, coming soon….
