Free-range Christmas turkeys could become a thing of the past due to the impact of avian flu – with many farmers now warning production was “not worth the risk” unless a viable vaccine was developed, and fast, MPs have heard.
Some 600,000 festive birds – representing about half the 1.2 million to 1.3 million free-range turkeys and geese earmarked for this year’s Christmas season – had now been lost to bird flu, said British Poultry Council CEO Richard Griffiths.
About 36% of poultry farms were now under some sort of avian flu restrictions, Griffiths added, while giving evidence to a Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee hearing into this autumn’s bird flu crisis today.
And many producers were therefore “thinking about whether they wanted to be in seasonal poultry, particularly in free-range”, he added.
“For next Christmas and subsequent Christmases, I fear for free-range production as a whole. We may see a drip-feed away from free-range production towards indoor [systems],” Griffiths said.
MPs on the committee also heard that just over one million of the 8.5 million to nine million birds being prepared for the festive season had either died or been culled as a result of bird flu – though Griffiths stressed supplies of indoor-reared birds were expected to hold up in the run-up to Christmas.
There was now an industry-wide consensus “that vaccination for avian flu is the path to take”, Griffiths said. “We must overcome the barriers for vaccination,” he added, citing trade barriers around vaccine development and deployment as the biggest challenge.
Producers that had been impacted by the bird flu outbreak just wanted to “curl up in a ball and cry”, added Kelly Turkeys MD Paul Kelly, who told MPs his business – which, unlike others, had managed to avoid being wiped out – had still been hit with a £1.2m bill as a result of the outbreak.
Some four million kept birds have now been lost to this worst-ever bird flu season, according to Defra data, with more than 130 confirmed cases of notifiable avian flu across the UK since the start of October.
The outbreak had wrought a “devastating” toll on producers – many of which had seen their entire business devastated, said Kelly, who added he was also considering the next steps ahead of next year’s festive turkey season.
“Some wonderful businesses have gone in the space of a few days,” he added.
“Can we take the risk for next year? In hindsight, I would not have done as I did this year [in terms of committing to so much free-range production],” he suggested.
“I don’t want to put the farm at risk. My head is in a real spin at the moment and lots of other producers will also think they don’t have enough confidence for next year.”
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