“A two-kilo chicken is reared on an A4 sheet”. In an investigation which will be published on Tuesday February 22 on the website of the animal protection association L214, Francis Guilloteau, a chicken breeder in Vendée for 36 years, highlights the practices of the Le Gaulois brand. On the occasion of the opening of the Agricultural Show on Saturday February 26, the L214 association is publishing this week one investigation per day on the different aspects of intensive farming. The first concerns the giant of chicken production, Le Gaulois, a brand belonging to the LDC group, one of the European leaders in poultry.
The testimony of Francis Guilloteau, who no longer raises poultry since the acquisition of his farm by the LDC group, is accompanied by videos shot in an intensive chicken farm located in Moncé-en-Saosnois, in Sarthe, which supplies Le Gaulois. The images broadcast are brutal. The farm raises up to twenty-two chickens per square metre, according to L214. The latter reportedly have no access to the outdoors, live crammed together and are subject to genetic selection to stimulate their growth. Result: animals intended for sale in supermarkets reportedly develop illnesses, suffer fractures and sometimes die of cardiac arrest. Dead animals could reportedly remain for several days among other chickens, close to dying birds. “It is a farm representative of chicken farms in France,” Sébastien Arsac, spokesperson for the association, told Capital.
Practices that weigh on breeders
These practices are all the more problematic as breeders who want to be “sustainable”, like Francis Guilloteau, would reportedly not be able to sell their chickens because the conditions imposed by the agrifood giants are so difficult. In the video investigation of L214, this breeder says that these firms “force him into more intensive farming”, asking him to further enlarge his buildings to cram in more animals. According to him, not only is the breeder working for Le Gaulois not the decision maker regarding his practices, but he finds himself in the red, all the profits being used to pay off the buildings. Francis Guilloteau, in a showdown with the consortium of agrifood companies that bought his farm three years ago, has therefore decided to stop his poultry farming.
The testimony of Francis Guilloteau is unprecedented, because according to the spokesperson for L214, breeders with large structures “are bound hand and foot to the cooperatives”. Large farms indeed involve considerable investment. Debt for poultry breeders amounted to an average of 257,100 euros in 2017, according to data from the statistics and forecasting service of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food published in 2018. “Breeders find themselves taking enormous risks, and this, for a minimal monthly income. If they encounter the slightest technical, sanitary or raw material price problem, they could lose everything”, warns Sébastien Arsac. For their products, farmers would therefore have no room for maneuver and could not set their prices.