Chicken Run: Poultry is getting expensive

The cost of chicken food, energy, and transport increasing, and fast food chains like KFC, Mcdonald’s, and Nando’s have already put some prices up. James Mottershead, boss of Co-op supermarkets has warned poultry could become as expensive as beef or lamb, as chicken prices increased from £2.50 to £3 per kg in the past two days and went up 14 per cent in a year. His family bought the West Midlands farm in 2001 which produces 1.5 million chickens a year. Poultry makes up 50 per cent of the meat eaten in the UK and one million birds are reared in the country every year according to the British Poultry Council. Hatcheries have come under pressure as costs of feed, electricity, and heating for the incubation period have gone up and those are being passed on to farms. In UK processing plants, most chickens are now killed using gas – usually carbon dioxide a by-product of the fertilizer production process.  Gas prices were already going up last year forcing fertilizer factories in the UK to suspend production. Russia is a huge producer of the key ingredients needed for fertilizer like ammonia, so knock-on effects on CO2 prices.