When the retail food industry demands meeting a price point and a profit margin that may mean there is not much left for the producer.  It’s exactly how we push producers to do unscrupulous things.

For example, feeding animals Hexane produced soybean meal, arsenic, and DDGS ethanol by products loaded with sulfur and antibiotics.

In the poultry industry the list of short cuts and cost cuts could fit the “pink slime” description.

Let’s start moving the bar up.  It starts with consumers demanding retailers to carry brands that follow strict quality protocols.

Our government spent billions to subsidize and promote using millions of acres of precious American farmland to replace imported oil is unconscionable.

Now that corn is worth three times the past 20 year average at $9.00 per bushel and nearly half the U.S. crop is going to produce ethanol, we may have started a food inflation cycle that will grow out of control.

Can you believe that we slow down our oil imports and increase food imports!

We need to use American farm land for more than just fuel!

Out of desperation many animal production farms have resorted to using up to 20% ethanol by-products in their diets.  Ethanol by-products are dangerous- antibiotic and chemical laced loads of garbage! I would not feed any animal this kind of product ever.

Food vs. Fuel leadership has gone amuck!

We at Bell & Evans have not cut quality in anything we do and our plans are to continue to improve in all areas.  This year we added fully recyclable boxes to our program and just recently started our SIA system.  We now think that we have the humane slaughter method for poultry in the World.

Every year around this time I have people tell me they barbequed their chicken and, even though they keep adding BBQ sauce,  the meat was dry. There is a very simple answer to this problem. PAR BOIL your chicken before putting it on the grill. It eliminates the problem of dry, charred meat outside and raw meat inside.

Just fill a pot with water, place the chicken pieces in the water and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes. Remove the chicken from the water, cover and set aside until you’re ready to grill.  This allows the meat to rest and retain its juices.  (Save the water you used to simmer the chicken for a stock base later.) The chicken will not be fully cooked, but it will require less time on the grill and less chance of drying out the meat.

When the grill is ready, place the pieces on the grill, until one side is golden brown, flip and brown the other side. At this point, if you choose, add your BBQ sauce and grill for several minutes until the sugar in the sauce starts to crackle and carmelize. Remove and serve. You and your family or guests will love the great taste of Bell & Evans grilled chicken!

Here are some simple words to live by: If you can’t pronounce it… don’t eat it.

Read food labels… especially the ingredient list. If it sounds like a chemical experiment, put it down. Also beware of some ‘all-natural’ products that say they contain “natural flavorings.” These so-called natural flavorings are added to foods that lose flavor in processing.

The definition of natural flavor under the Code of Federal Regulations is: “the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.” (21CFR101.22).

Natural flavorings include things like high-fructose corn syrup, glutamate, sodium benzoate, etc.; and are created by ‘flavorists’ and produced in laboratories. There’s nothing natural about it.

I’m proud of Bell & Evan’s ingredients and encourage you to read our labels. We use all-natural ingredients in every frozen ready-to-cook and fully-cooked product we make. No artificial colorings – No artificial flavorings – No fillers – No extenders. I promise you won’t need a degree in chemical engineering to read them!

It all starts with our unique air-chilled processing system. Every Bell & Evans chicken is air chilled, so no water or chlorine permeates the meat to dilute the flavor or add water weight. Our chicken retains its own natural juices and insures each piece is tender and full of flavor. Whether fresh or frozen, you’ll taste the honest natural chicken flavor in every bite.

Read… then taste the difference for yourself!

 The celebration of Earth Day is a great time for individuals as well as companies to rededicate themselves to protecting the environment.

At Bell & Evans, it is part of our Bell & Evans Best Practices Standard to be good stewards of the land year-round.

ON THE FARM

• Infertile Eggs are recycled – the liquids are separated from the shells and sent to a local methane digester to be converted to electricity. The shells are pulverized and used in fertilizer.

• Extruded and Expeller-pressed Soybeans – produce soy meal without releasing toxic Hexane gas into our environment. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) categorizes hexane as a hazardous air pollutant.

• Reclaimed Oil – oil, that is extruded and expeller pressed from soy beans, is converted to biodiesel and used by the trucks to transport grain to and from the mill.

• Chicken Manure – is composted for use on the farm or sold to other agricultural industries for fertilizer.

AT THE FACILITY

• Air Chilled Facility – our air-chilled system lowers our water usage by tens of thousands of gallons of water each day, over traditional poultry processing plants.

• State-of-the-art Wastewater Treatment Plant – wastewater effluent is discharged into the stream next to our plant, that is abundant with fish, muskrat, mink, frog and bird activity.

IN PACKAGING

• Fresh Packaging Trays – our new fresh product trays are made from 50% recycled materials and are PETE #1 recyclable.

• Frozen Packaging Boxes – are ‘paperboard packaging recyclable’ which means they are made from recycled or recyclable materials.

• Recyclable Shipping Containers – Since water does not weep from our air-chilled chicken, we and our retailers can recycle all of our shipping containers. Little changes can make a big difference.

Please join me in conserving our natural resources.

It’s the right thing to do.

At the beginning of the new year, we all make resolutions to eat healthier. I thought it would be a good time to tell you about our chickens diet, because well-fed chickens are happy and less-stressed. The Bell & Evans Animal Welfare Standard guarantees our birds always have access to fresh water and our specially-blended feed.

The Bell & Evans Diet
Our birds thrive on our scientifically-formulated, all-vegetarian diet. The feed is Bell & Evans’ special blend of locally-grown corn and extruded and expeller-pressed soybeans, supplemented with three times the recommended vitamins, including A, D, E, K, B-12, niacin, riboflavin and thiamine. To bolster our young chick’s immune systems, they are fed a special starter diet, containing 15-times the recommended amounts of vitamin E, an antioxidant.

Each batch is electronically monitored to make sure it meets our formulation standards, plus our feed is routinely lab-checked to assure its nutrient value remains constant. We also take the extra step to pelletize the feed, because it makes it more digestible and less likely that contaminants can enter the food chain.  
 
Unlike commodity-produced chickens, we never feed our birds junk food such as rendered meat scraps; bone, feather or fish meal; animal fats; expired bakery goods; used cooking oils or grease; or feed additives containing arsenic. That doesn’t sound very appetizing, does it? We don’t think so either.
 
You may ask…
Why are extruded soybeans and expeller-pressed soybeans so important?
Our special soybean processing method is environmentally friendly and produces soy meal that is richer in healthy nutrients such a lecithin, linoleic acid and vitamin E than the commonly used hexane solvent-extraction process. Nearly all soybeans in the United States are processed using the hexane solvent-extraction method. As part of this process, hexane gas is released into the air.

The Environmental Protection Agency categorizes hexane as a hazardous air pollutant. Residuals from the hexane potentially remain in the final meal. Though solvent extraction is more economical, we believe that raising a healthier chicken and protecting the environment far outweigh the costs.
 
Growing Organic
Our organically-grown chickens dine on an all-vegetable, organic diet made from grains grown in the United States. They get their energy from locally-grown extruded soybeans and expeller pressed soybeans, enhanced with corn and amino acids, that provide additional protein and fiber essential for growing the most tender and flavorful organic chicken. Did you know some poultry producers purchase cheap, questionably “organic” grains from China? For more information: http://www.cornucopia.org/2009/05/soy-report-and-scorecard/

Bell & Evans organic farms are certified organic by Pennsylvania Certified Organic, a USDA-accredited certifier.  PCO performs regular on site plant inspections, assuring you we continue to meet the USDA’s stringent requirements for organic certification.

And, of course, all Bell & Evans chickens receive no growth hormones or antibiotics, including Ionophores, in their feed, their water, or even the egg…ever.
 
In my next entry, I want to talk about how The Bell & Evans Humane Animal Welfare Standard impacts transporting our birds from the farm to the plant.

Unlike the conditions you may have seen depicted in Food Inc., our chicken houses are state-of-the-art and very clean.  We build our houses with cement floors that have a raised lip on the sides.  It makes it easier to clean and guarantees rodents cannot tunnel under the floor and up into the house.  Rodents are the major cause of salmonella and campylobacter, and their presence is very stressful to chickens.   

After each flock of chickens, we remove all manure and litter then thoroughly clean and disinfect the house. The house remains empty for approximately two weeks to make sure any virus life cycle has been broken, to protect the next flock. Then a new bed of clean, wood shavings is laid down…unlike other poultry producers who just add new litter on top of old manure.

Before the chicks arrive at the farm, the temperature in the house is raised to 90-92°.  Chickens are very sensitive to temperature. If it’s too hot, they get stressed. If it’s too cold, they get stressed. Our houses have cutting-edge electronic systems that monitor all conditions in the house, to provide year-round climate control and to insure optimal temperature and air quality in the house.

Fresh litter and constant fresh air circulation keep dust and ammonia in the house to a minimum. If you saw Food Inc., you’ll remember the people in the houses were having difficulty breathing, so much ammonia had built up in the house. We never have that problem, because we don’t leave that old manure in the house. Also our chickens don’t suffer from hock burns.  These marks are where the ammonia from the waste of other birds has burned through the skin on the bird’s leg. It’s painful and totally unnecessary.

We have a new video coming out at the end of the year. It will be available for you to see on our new website. When you watch it, you’ll see for yourself the steps we take to make sure our chicks are healthy and happy.

In my next entry, I want  to talk about the chickens’ life at the farm.

In my last blog, I talked about the October 21, 2010 New York Times article, New Way to Help Chickens Cross to Other Side, by William Neuman. I talked about how our new slow induction anesthesia (SIA) will be a more humane, low-stress system that gently puts the birds to sleep before they are processed.

But the story doesn’t end there.  

SIA is the final step in years of work to create a lifecycle of humane animal compassion for our birds.  

Over the years, we’ve developed The Bell & Evans Humane Animal Welfare Standard, our guidelines that govern all aspects of our chickens’ lives and insure they receive the highest standards of humane animal treatment… for their entire life, not just during processing…from the breeder and the farm, to transport and the processing plant. Over the next few weeks I will discuss how our birds are cared for in each phase of their life. Today I want to start at the beginning and talk about our breeder farms.

We carefully select our breeder chickens and raises them from chicks, so they’re sure they grow up strong and healthy. Fresh air, fresh water and our specially-formulated, all-vegetarian diet help assure the flock will remain healthy.  Our breeders have spacious, well-ventilated houses that protect the chickens from the elements and predators, but still give them plenty of room to roam.  We carefully control their environment. Too hot or too cold and chickens get stressed. Fans, heaters and side walls that open, allow fresh air to circulate in warm weather and keep the house at a comfortable temperature year round.  We give the chickens special areas for socializing and the individual nests, with walls on three sides, give the hen a sense of security, while she’s laying her egg.  We don’t artificially inseminate our chickens, they mate naturally. If you saw Food Inc., you saw how stressful it was for those birds. As with all Bell & Evans facilities, our farm families dedicate their lives to the health and welfare of our chickens. They enforce strict B&E Standards in care, feeding and bio-security to protect our flocks.

In my next blog, I’ll discuss how we care for our chicks on the farm.

Even if you don’t read The New York Times, by now you’ve probably heard that we are again moving ‘ahead of the curve’… this time in farm animal welfare, by revolutionizing the way we begin to process our birds.

I was interviewed by The New York Times for their Oct. 22 front page article, New Way to Help Chickens Cross to Other Side, that focused on our new slow induction anesthesia system, which uses a CO2 gas to gently put the birds to sleep before they are processed.

To really understand why our new process is so important, you have to know a little about how live chickens are processed. The chickens are brought to a dimly lit area where workers pick them up by their legs and hang them upside down. A conveyor carries the birds to a unit that uses a mild electric shock to make them unconscious, and then to a machine that kills them.

Our new system is a gentle, stress-free, and much more humane way to process chickens. It works on the birds in the same way anesthesia works on a person before going into surgery. There’s no stress or panicked wing flapping that can injure the birds or our workers.

I’ve been researching the best way to do this and for the past 15 years. I’ve toured many European processing plants and analyzed their controlled-atmosphere stunning systems. I believe the custom-built system we’ve developed is much better. Their systems are designed to kill the birds, not put them to sleep. They can cut-off the birds of oxygen too quickly, which may cause them to suffer.

Earlier this year, Monica and I spent my birthday in Colorado and met with Temple Grandin. As a leading authority in livestock handling facilities, I wanted to get her input before we started construction. After showing her videos of the process and discussing our plans, she agreed, “This will be a big step forward for chicken welfare.”

For the last year, we have worked closely with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) on this project. Although they would like everyone to be vegan, even they recognize it’s not going to happen. However, they share our compassion for farm animal welfare, and PETA applauds our efforts to raise our chickens with the best quality of life.

In my next entry, I’ll talk more about how this $3 million upgrade to our process will result in higher quality meat for your dinner table.

Back in October, my wife Monica and I journeyed to Cologne. Every other year the largest food show in the world is held there. I’ve been there many times over the years. It’s a great place to meet people and share ideas. I like to pick up on things before they get to our shores. I was very impressed with how far the organic programs have come in Europe and the support they receive from the governments. The meats on the menus on the German railroad were all organic.

After walking the show for two days and picking up a lot of new ideas, we headed for Vienna Austria. Every store or restaurant we visited in Austria had organic poultry available. There is no doubt in my mind that they take organic production very seriously in Europe. This trip definitely lifted my spirit in moving our organic program forward.

Before leaving Austria, I had to stop in Ebbs to visit the world headquarters of the Halfinger Horse. I have 11 of these great horses on our farm. They give me a break from the chickens. Europe was a great inspiration for me. Now I am home with my healthy, happy chickens.

My next blog entry will visit the movie Food Inc.