Lambton County farmer raises over 100,000 chickens a year
Ten years ago, Theo Kusters had never touched a chicken.
Now, he’s probably touched over a million.
The Holland native spent the first 20 years of his adult life working a 9 to 5 job as a circuit board designer before he gave it all up to move with his family to Canada to become a dairy farmer. That didn’t work out, but friends pointed him in the direction of chickens, and he decided to give it a try.
“I’m really happy with it,” he says, a decade later.
“I could sell (the flock) tomorrow, but I’d miss the chickens.”
Along with his wife, Gerdi, and son, Martin, Kusters owns and operates a farm for broilers – chickens that will be used for meat – just outside of Wyoming.
He normally raises about 24,000 birds at a time – slightly above the average of 22,000 for the 1,100 Ontario broiler farms.
He gets the birds at one-day-old and raises them for 40 days and, when they’re about 2.6 kilograms, they’re shipped out. Kusters then spends a few days cleaning the 265 foot by 40 foot barn, and the cycle starts again.
There are usually six of the nine-week cycles per year.
“But sometimes I have to skip a flock.”
Since Kusters supplies to Maple Leaf, his chicks also come from a Maple Leaf breeder. All 24,000 get dropped off on the same day.
Crates of the tiny birds arrive at the farm in a heated fan truck, and they’re unloaded into the barn.
“It’s amazing – we put the birds in the barn, and within half an hour, they’re all drinking.”
The birds get water – which they access through drink nipples attached to a series of pipes – treated with an extremely low concentration of acetic acid, which not only helps clean the pipes and keep them bacteria-free, but it also promotes the chickens’ intestine function.
The chicks eat 100 per cent grain feed, also distributed throughout the barn by a series of pipes. There are no animal by-products in the feed, Kusters stresses.
“We live in the country. We’re swamped with corn,” he adds with a laugh.
The Wyoming man will get 10 shipments of feed for each flock of birds. The first eight loads will contain preventative medicine, since the chickens scratch their droppings in the inch-deep straw.
“That’s how they get sick.”
But since farmers don’t want the antibiotics to be consumed by humans, the last two loads of feed will not have any medicines, so there will be no trace of drugs in the animals’ bodies by the time they reach dinner tables.
It’s during the first two weeks that the birds are most vulnerable to moisture, drafts and disease. At this stage, Kusters spends about 30 minutes walking through the two-storey barn every four hours – day and night – to make sure the broilers are healthy and that they’re getting enough to eat and drink.
Then, he gets to relax a bit for the next few weeks.
“That’s the easy time for me – it’s my holiday.”
At any given time in the part, the farmer estimates that 25 per cent of the birds are eating, 25 per cent are drinking, and the rest are roaming. Yes, roaming, he adds.
“People need to know that the birds are walking around. They have a good life – a short life, but a really good life.”
The barn where they’re kept is actually designed for more than 24,000 broilers, but since that’s the number Kusters needs to fill his government-appointed quota, the birds get a bit more space than they might at other farms.
After having the chickens for 40 days, a team of about 14 catchers comes in to capture the birds one-by-one and ship them to the processing plant, where they’ll be killed and put on grocery store shelves within a couple days.
“It’s a bad job,” says Kusters, of the young men that catch the chickens.
“They have to physically grab birds by the leg and put them in the truck. And they have to do it with 24,000 birds.”
Typically, the process – which takes about four hours – is done at night.
For most of their time in the barn, the broilers are kept in fairly dim conditions to help reduce stress. To load them up during the day would be brighter and therefore more stressful, so Kusters tries to avoid it – but it does happen sometimes.
All of the chickens are inspected at the processing plant, and any with scratches or bruises – typically incurred during stressful periods – are condemned, which means they will not be sold for food.
“I can see how gentle the catchers were based on how many condemnations there are.”
Once the birds leave, Kusters’ most grueling work begins.
For two days, he loads out the straw and droppings. He sweeps and uses a leaf blower to get all the dust out.
He power washes the barn, cleans out the fans, feed room and equipment, and then everything is disinfected and left for two days.
That’s when he’ll chip all the straw to be spread over the floor of the barn for the new flock of broilers.
In a typical year, Kusters loses about 2.5 per cent of the birds. Last year, the number was higher because he lost power during a thunderstorm when temperatures and humidity were high.
Normally, there are computerized systems in place to deal with light, temperature, humidity and draftiness in the barn, and if something goes wrong, it sets off an alarm on his cell phone.
But in some cases – like that one July day in 2011 – everything goes wrong at once.
“That’s sad. All you can do is call the neighbours to help.”
Kusters believes that his farm, along with the 2,800 other broiler farms in Canada, is able to take such good care of its birds because of the national supply management system.
Because governmental bodies determine how much chicken will be consumed nationally, provincial boards can determine how much chicken its farmers need to produce, and each farmer is asked to fill a particular quota.
Whereas other countries use a price support method, which encourages farmers to produce as much meat as possible, supply management ensures that total production responds to the Canadian demand for poultry, explains Kusters.
Farmers are actually penalized if they overproduce.
What that translates to for Kusters is a more concentrated effort on producing happy, healthy chickens, he says.
“It gives us the opportunity to do it right rather than trying to be the biggest. Food safety is important to us. Animal welfare is important to us. And that’s possible because we’re all on the same playing field,” he says.
“I’m confident to say we produce – in Canada – the safest chickens in the world. Maybe we pay a bit more for chicken at the grocery store, but it’s worth it.”
For each flock that the Kusters send out, they’re allowed to keep 10 to 15 birds for their own consumption. They can’t sell them because they haven’t been inspected by an official, but the family is allowed to eat them – and they do.
“I cook it all kinds of ways,” says Gerdi Kuster.
“We like the breast and the legs. We eat a lot of chickens.”
~Heather Linda Young~
Sarnia and Lambton County This Week