Consumers Are Demanding Antibiotic-Free Meat, and Big Food Is Starting to Listen

Petaluma Poultry in the hills north of San Francisco is the kind of place most people might like to imagine their chicken dinner comes from. Free-range chickens meander in a shaded outdoor area, picking for worms and bugs, while a sea of week-old...

August 11, 2014 | Source: PRI | by Joe Rubin

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Chickens and other livestock grown without the use of antibiotics are a small but growing part of the US food market. Perdue is now the largest producer of antibiotic-free chicken in the country, and other big players in the food industry are following the lead of consumers in joining the trend. But most of the drugs used in the US are still given to animals, and health advocates say much more needs to be done to reduce the growing threat of antibiotic resistance.

Petaluma Poultry in the hills north of San Francisco is the kind of place most people might like to imagine their chicken dinner comes from. Free-range chickens meander in a shaded outdoor area, picking for worms and bugs, while a sea of week-old chicks skitters and chirps underfoot inside a barn, with lots of room to roam.

It feels like some quaint little organic farm. But Petaluma sends a quarter of a million birds every week to supermarkets like Costco, Kroger and Trader Joe’s. And they do it without a staple of modern industrial animal farming – antibiotics.

Most poultry and livestock producers these days rely heavily on antibiotics to promote growth and prevent the diseases that can come with lots of animals raised together in close quarters. They’re cheap and effective – so cheap and effective that nearly 80 percent of antibiotics used in the US are put in animal feed.

But scientists say overuse of the drugs is contributing to a huge global problem – growing resistance to antibiotics that are crucial to human health. The World Health Organization says it threatens the achievements of modern medicine, and calls are increasing to do something about it.

Here in the US, legislation to clamp down on the use of antibiotics in farm animals has gone nowhere in Congress, but change is nonetheless rippling through the industry, at places like Petaluma.

Rancher Mike Leventini says Petaluma follows basic principles that allow it to raise millions of birds without antibiotics.

“You spend more on fuel to heat the chicken houses,” Leventini says, ticking off items on the company’s list of practices. “You keep the litter dry, you keep fresh air in the barn, you keep light in the barn, you let them go outside. You are doing all these things to keep the birds from getting sick.”