“The outlook for the poultry and egg sector is largely positive for the remainder of 2014,” was the opening comment made by Minister Tom Hayes at Bord Bia’s Poultry & Egg Conference in Monaghan last week. Farming is an area where poultry is at the heart of the local rural economy, and the conference was thought-provoking and encouraging for those of us who want to secure our future.

Dr. Aline Veauthier from the University of Vechta in Germany gave an overview of the European poultry market. It was disappointing to see from her presentation that Ireland experienced no growth in poultry meat production since 2000. Yet in the same period, our consumption of poultry meat has grown dramatically in response to consumers switching from higher priced sources of meat. This has created opportunities for increased imports from international markets in the food service sector especially.

Perhaps some of the reasons why Irish production has stagnated was explained in the presentation made by Mark Williams (British Egg Industry Council), who stated that half of the cost of egg production in the EU is attributed to the adherence to European legislation.

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The question this posed for me is how do we compete in a marketplace with cheap imported product from countries with little or no regulation, while offering the consumer a value for money product? One could be terrified by this challenge, but as I listened to the other speakers, my fear turned to confidence.

Origin Green is part of the solution. In Dr. Aline’s summary, she suggested that consumers had a decreasing social acceptance of large scale production facilities because of their environmental problems and the perception of a lack of animal welfare. She concluded that the future lay in sustainable production.

Sustainability

Bord Bia’s Origin Green sustainability programme offers us the opportunity to fight back and win over consumers with a better product, ethically produced and demonstrates our desire to ensure that we return our environment to the next generation as we inherited it.

As farmers, we must bear some responsibility for the lack of connection between the consumer and ourselves. We do little to promote the care with which we produce our chickens and eggs. With the help of the retailers, we must show consumers the benefits of consuming sustainably produced poultry meat and eggs for their family. We need to adapt to ever-changing consumer demands and we now have the opportunity to become world leaders in sustainability.

As Bord Bia’s Peter Duggan stated during his presentation, the Origin Green programme is designed to demonstrate and improve our sustainability credentials, whilst providing a platform to communicate these credentials to customers that will help build desire for Irish food and drink over time. Origin Green must become a matter of pride for us as producers.

As Peter pointed out, we now have the opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint at farm level through the rolling out of the sustainability element in the Bord Bia Poultry Quality Assurance Scheme in early 2015. This initiative can help producers improve efficiencies through lower input usage which can in turn increase profitability.

Festive opportunities

No better time than the present to start making changes. Christmas offers an amazing opportunity for consumers to identify with producer driven initiatives. For us, we see people more willing to be less price-driven in their purchases and focus more on high quality produce.

We intend to express more of what is good and sustainable about our farm over Christmas in the hope this will be reciprocated in repeat purchases by consumers for all their special occasions throughout the year. Christmas will be a very busy time on our farm with our chickens requiring the same care and attention on Christmas Day as they do on any other day during the year.