Rabobank poultry analyst Will Sawyer believes that consumer demand for more information about how farm animals are raised is a trend that is not going away, he said in a interview with Brownfield Ag News. “Many chicken producers around the U.S. can relate to antibiotic free and organic and the expansion of slow growing chickens. These are trends that we think have a lot of staying power despite them being pretty expensive, ” Sawyer said.
Sawyer told Brownfield that production stratification preferences of consumers is mostly a westernized phenomenon. “Can the international market pay those higher prices and are they willing to? And the answer probably for the most part is no,” Sawyer said
However, he said U.S. consumers are willing to pay higher prices for products that meet their demand and retailers are also making production requests on farmers. “One of the major future customers in the U.S. will be Whole Foods who has mandated by 2024 that they will only be providing their customers slow growing chicken by that time. So we’ll have to see how the U.S. industry evolves to serve that demand.”
Sawyer said slow growing chicken is still up for interpretation but generally the birds gain less than 50 grams per day, which is significantly less than the average commercial chicken in the United States. And, he said when farmers invest in more expensive production practices they also need demand for most parts of the animal, like dark meat, to remain profitable.
Will Sawyer will be speaking at the National Chicken Council’s upcoming annual conference in Washington, D.C. scheduled October 26-27. Sawyer will be participating in a panel discussion regarding poultry, pork, beef and feedstuffs with other representatives from EMI Analytics, Cattlefax, and Advanced Economic Solutions.
