Better Genetics for Poultry

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on March 18, 2010

I just came back from a trip to France where I traveled with my colleague Niel Ritchie at Main Street Project. Our mission was to visit farms, founders, genetic companies and the organizations that developed, manage and currently administer the Label Rouge, a french label developed to assure consumers that certain protocols for growing food are followed. Their biggest claim is in the poultry area with 25% of the market share through a unique free range poultry system.

I had read some documents and inquired about this system more than two and a half years ago as we embarked in an effort to create a free range poultry system for the U.S. but it is until now that it has become relevant as we look at the larger scale potential of our efforts. The reason I say “to create” is not because there aren’t good farmers growing free range poultry in the U.S. but because after looking at many of these projects, we were unable to find one that could potentially be scaled through a national program and eventually create a true alternative to conventional poultry.

So we developed a system, over the last two years and I have written in this blog about how it came about. This trip to France was the first of a series as we explore solutions to the genetic bottleneck in our U.S. poultry industry. We need to find a diversity of options for birds that can grow fast but slower than Cornish Broilers so that birds can fully develop their frames and capacity to sustain their own weight and live a happy life. The taste has also been lost with our U.S. genetics. What we need is a bird that can grow slower than cornish broilers but faster than heritage breeds, while maintaining many of the abilities of heritage breeds such as ranging in the outdoors, better food conversion rates, and most importantly a traditional taste and texture for the meat which we have lost in the conventional genetically deteriorated mass produced birds available from factory farms today.

As we move forward with our research and development at our own experimental sites in Minnesota, we will continue to develop the corporate infrastructure, make the proper arrangements and continue to explore the introduction of better genetics into our system. When we launch our first economic cluster between Northfield and Red Wing, we want to be able do so with a superior product that will do best under the free range and ecologically holistic growing protocols that we have established.