The Poultry industry is feeling the heat from climate change.
Montrose Holdings Limited managing director Dominic De Freitas says this is the reality facing his group, which includes Chickmont Foods Limited, a leading Caribbean integrated poultry business, and the wider chicken farming community.
“Climate change is real for the poultry industry based on statistics on chicken mortality statistics dating back to 2015,” De Freitas said in an interview.
“Chicken mortality in climate controlled chicken houses in Barbados is stable. The problem is farms without climate control. From 2021, just after COVID, we had a little bit of a peak, and it just kept climbing and it never stopped,” he explained.
Referencing overall data on chicken farm mortality in Barbados, De Freitas said that after falling from 8.7 per cent in 2020 to 8.27 per cent in 2021, chicken deaths on farms with open-sided pens increased to 9.28 per cent in 2022, 11.46 per cent in 2023, and 12.07 per cent in 2024.
Linked to climate change
These percentages are calculated based on the overall number of chickens on all farms reporting data.
He attributed the higher mortality mainly to more adverse heat linked to climate change, as he compared mortality numbers on poultry farms with open-sided chicken pens to those with tunnel pens.
Chicken deaths on poultry farms with tunnel pens were 8.27 per cent in 2020, 6.67 per cent in 2021, 6.91 per cent in 2022, before rising to 8.91 per cent in 2023, and then falling to 7.39 per cent in 2024.
De Freitas said it was clear that while having climate-controlled chicken houses did not eradicate poultry farm mortality, it helped to reduce deaths on farms – both for broilers and layers.
The managing director, who reported that the industry had an overall 10.8 million broilers last year, and averaged about 200 000 layers annually, argued that “climate change is exponential and it’s correlated directly with what has been going on with mortality on chicken farms”.
“Any extra mortality means that I don’t have those chickens or eggs because the higher mortality is affecting broilers and layers. Mortality of 12 per cent on open
sided pens means those farmers have to have to increase capacity,” he said.
Help remedy challenges
“But fortunately, we have the ability to use climate control. About 60 per cent of our supply is climate controlled. So now I just have to account for this 40 per cent that is not from climate control farms, that is why I need more chickens.” Chickmont will construct five chicken houses in St Philip – each will accommodate 45 000 chickens – and they will be “fully mechanised and fully climate-controlled chicken houses”. De Freitas said the company is also keen to help its contract growers remedy the extreme heat challenges on their farms. “The contract growers still have to earn income with us, but the higher mortality means that they also lose money. So I need to also make sure that they are taken care of because we are an inclusive farming environment, we are an inclusive company.” He said that “Government and the Barbados Agricultural Society have already started to assist poultry farmers in improving their processes, and make investments in their chicken houses, so they are going to improve”. “And I have encouraged them to buy fans for climate control. You put these fans inside the chicken houses, which will stir the air up in there and keep it cool. Our fans on our Chickmont chicken houses, they have a lot more technicalities [compared] with those fans because they are a tunnel,” he said. (SC)
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