By Sheria Brathwaite
The management of Gale’s Agro Products is denying allegations that it is supplying lower quality chicks to small farmers.
In an interview with Barbados TODAY, Managing Director Barry Gale said that claim was utterly “false” as all customers received “the same chickens coming from the same suppliers from the same breeding flocks”.
He asserted that the intense daytime heat was causing significant operational challenges on many small farms and as farmers grappled with high mortality rates and slowed growth, his business had become an easy target.
The businessman was responding to claims by many small farmers last Wednesday at a heated annual general meeting of the Barbados Egg and Poultry Producers’ Association.
The farmers claimed they were seeing high mortality rates on their farms and said they were concerned that larger producers were getting better quality chicks.
“That’s false, that’s false . . . . The temptation for any small farmer is to believe that the larger customer is getting a better product and better service, but my belief has always been that everybody that grows chickens, regardless of numbers, is important because you’re a customer who’s buying repeatedly . . . . I rely on farmers who come every couple of weeks for another batch of chicks and their repeat business is extremely important to us,” Gale insisted.
He said he sympathised with small producers as he understood that rearing chickens was not just to make a profit but also “to feed their families”. However, he said larger producers were having more success during these heated days because they had technologically advanced cooling systems to raise birds, unlike smaller players.
“Small farmers traditionally have made do with what they have in terms of their chicken house and their equipment and the amount of energy and effort that they put into it. Many of the small farmers are farming poultry as a sort of a side hustle where they’re making extra money to support their family.
“Unfortunately, with our environment right now, the heat that we are experiencing, the temperature of the air outside of the chicken pen during the day is already hotter than the chicken can handle. So, while air from outside may be blowing into the pen and might be removing even hotter air inside the pens, it still is excessive for the chickens. Technically, at four and five weeks old, if the chicken is experiencing a temperature that is 30 degrees or higher, then it’s going to go into heat stress. When they’re very young they like that temperature but as they get older the requirement of temperature drops; the ideal air temperature for a six-week old broiler is 22 degrees which is much cooler than we experience, even in December. So I think some of these small farmers may be struggling to understand what is happening.”
Gale acknowledged that it was human nature to point fingers when things go wrong.
“I think the small farmers are seeing the larger and more technical farms, especially the climate-controlled tunnel pens, get good results and are wondering why they can’t also get better growth and survivability. It’s not always obvious that these large farms are much more able to meet the temperature requirements of the chickens.
“Forty years ago, broilers took eight/ten weeks to grow to our market size of two kilogrammes and now they’re doing that in five weeks. A broiler today is like a Formula 1 car while 40 years ago they were more like a family station wagon. The chicken is growing so quickly and generating so much body heat that the slightest thing that affects it is going to make a big difference to the overall growth,” Gale said.
The businessman stressed that educating farmers about best practices and technology was important and he said he was planning to introduce education programmes to his customers soon. However, he said that if there were issues with chicks he supplied which were traceable to the hatchery through veterinary examination, it was normal business practice for his company to replace those for any farmer, large or small.
sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb
