Changing chicken for net zero: practices and beliefs from the poultry industry

This scoping study explores how to advance behaviour change research relevant to the Government’s (2022) Net Zero Strategy for the agri-food system. Poultry has an image of being a lower carbon footprint meat. However, it does accrue a global carbon footprint not least from the sources of poultry feed and finding a home for all parts of the chicken carcass.

Currently, the concept of ‘net-zero’ and decarbonisation is not a food consumer-citizen concern, and perhaps it should not be, but an industry/regulator responsibility. Whichever, this scoping project through a workshop begins the process of engaging and gauging interest of participants on this topic as both poultry industry employees and consumer-citizens to understand existing beliefs and practices. What is (un)known, what could or can’t be done, and why? With a diverse employee community, holding conversations across the poultry industry brings minority and disempowered voices together with those imagined more powerful.

Project lead: Emma Roe, University of Southampton

Project members: Samantha Green, The Applied Group; Damian Maye, University of Gloucestershire; Sarah Lambton, University of Bristol; Daniel Mafulul, Aston University; Saher Hasnain, University of Oxford

Findings from the project

1. Industry participants agreed that life cycle assessments had to be used in net zero accounting processes. A unified effort to address net zero was required across the poultry industry, with each playing their part.
2. Frustration expressed with the size of the effort into on-farm carbon reduction when this is only 5% of the footprint, pointing particularly at poultry feed making up 70% (i.e., need to account for indirect non-UK inputs as part of net zero poultry accounting).
3. Concern that an alternative to soya beans is not currently available, and that the responsibility for addressing this lay with the poultry processors/integrators who manage 80% of the UK poultry sector. In other words the technology alternatives are available but less so the will to engage with them.
4. Reluctance to acknowledge scientific evidence that the poultry industry has a poor sustainability and poor poultry welfare record, tending to consider negative media that is responsible for its bad reputation on the intersecting sustainability challenges it faces.
5. Hope is placed nearly exclusively in (bio) technological solutions to address the net zero challenge, in keeping with what has enabled the poultry industry to grow and expand over the last 50 years.

Recommendations for future research

To develop and establish an ethical policy-instrument and framework to address industrial socio-metabolic processes in UK food system resilience risk-management, which includes orientation to address net-zero. This means that poultry feed through to poultry waste and the implications on the health of those who eat chicken, especially in processed form, needs to be researched.