By Sheria Brathwaite
There will be enough poultry and eggs for the Christmas season, the island’s leading poultry hatchery said Friday, even as it said it is experiencing a significant decline in egg hatchability.
In an interview with Barbados TODAY, Barry Gale of Gale’s Agro Products said his Mangrove, St Philip hatchery was under pressure due to an egg fertility issue, which was being compounded by a sudden increase in demand for chicks.
“It’s part of nature; it’s not like somebody was negligent or anything like that,” he said.
Despite acknowledging a shortfall in meeting many customers’ orders, Gale assured that operations should be back to normal within the next seven days.
He was responding to complaints from small farmers that they were not getting the quantity of chicks they had ordered, and their claims that it appeared the hatchery had cut back its operations.
Gale explained: “In 2020, during the outbreak of COVID-19, a lot of small farmers were forced, out of necessity, to cancel orders and save themselves from investing into chickens that they weren’t going to be able to sell. We euthanised over 100 000 chickens that year. So we had to modify our egg-buying practices to adapt to the trend and that involved making a decision on a percentage of the total amount of chickens we hatched.
“For example, if we had orders for 100 chickens, we hatched 80 chickens because we knew that there were going to be cancellations. So we’ve been doing that quite happily for the last eight months since the social compact ended with no real challenge in terms of being over or under significantly on any given day.”
However, Gale said the hatchery started to notice there were issues with the fertility of the eggs they imported.
“About two weeks ago, we had the first of a number of hatches where the fertility of the eggs wasn’t as good as they were supposed to have been and so our hatch percentage dropped quite low,” he told Barbados TODAY. “So we were unable to supply all of our customers on that day. So we had to move them forward the next day, but then the next day the hatch was equally bad. And so we had a bit of a compounding problem.
“Sometimes you get 85 out of 100 and you get 75 out of 100 and unfortunately, two or three times in a row, we got 75 out of 100 or less.”
Coupled with that, Gale said he had seen a greater demand for chicks. Based on anecdotal evidence, he said that a large poultry producer either stopped producing or reduced their production and, as a result, small farmers were in turn gaining more orders.
He also said another hatchery had recently shut down.
“So now the small farmers are turning to us for chickens that they were getting originally from the other hatchery in the north. The industry had little warning about the closure of this hatchery so we had little chance to respond, particularly me because I support the same customers that buy from that hatchery. So we didn’t have any chance to respond by buying additional eggs to say we expected some more demand.”
In an effort to ensure that every customer who ordered eggs received, Gale admitted that he had to make some adjustments.
“We’ve had a couple of hatches where we’ve had to cut customers’ orders by 30 or 40 per cent and, in one case, even 50 per cent just to absorb all of the shortfalls. We’ve had to take the unfortunate measure of cutting everyone across the board so that everybody had a fair chance at having some chicks.
“But some of the people who are saying that they can’t get chickens are also people who didn’t have orders with us. So we have to meet our customers with orders before we meet the customers that didn’t have orders. So the way the situation was being described was grossly exaggerated.”
On Wednesday, at a heated annual general meeting of the Barbados Egg and Poultry Producers’ Association, veteran farmer Anthony Spencer said several small farmers were having issues accessing chicks.
He said: “Some people are trying to get chicks and cannot get any while others are getting all the time. They are being asked to pay half of the money and can’t get the chicks. Then they are being given a date in November and those chickens cannot grow in time to meet December. The small farmers want to get a lil’ money in December . . . . This is their biggest selling time”.
Gale pushed back on Spencer’s assertion.
“It is not a case of small farmers in Barbados not being able to get chickens. It is a case of, we have a temporary situation of poor hatchability, which is being corrected as we speak. We have different flocks with more fertility already in the incubators hatching out in the next week. So we anticipate that by the end of next week, the baby chick issue will be brought to normal . . . .We have already bought more eggs because we knew it was coming up to Christmas and we bought additional eggs because we knew that we would get some more demand. So we are relatively comfortable that this temporary issue is going to disappear quite quickly.”
Gale said that there should be no shortages for Christmas from his hatcheries.
“In terms of the actual numbers, it doesn’t mean that the industry is short by 50 per cent of chickens over this two-week period because then you would expect that the whole island would be short of chickens, and that’s definitely not the case. We supply half of the market; [the second hatchery] hatches the other half. So the actual overall impact on the industry for Christmas is not going to be how it sounds . . . . I think we’re quite comfortably going to be okay for Christmas.”
sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb
