Bad Move – Russia Lifts Chicken Ban on America…

A day-old chick
I am Traveling to Russia One Day…

In what Sveta and I consider a bad move on the part of the Kremlin. Russia made a decision that lifted a trade ban on poultry imports of 71 U.S. company‘s on Thursday.  Russia will retain the ban on the remaining 16 companies that do not want to meet the country’s sanitation requirements.

Russia banned imports of U.S. chlorine-treated poultry as of January 1 2010, citing new safety requirements. U.S. poultry has traditionally accounted for almost 80% of Russia’s total poultry imports.

This is not a necessarily a good thing for Russians to do. But it looks like from local sources, that lots of money has exchanged hands in getting American chicken back into Russia. The American chicken farms had a huge hurt put on them and they need to get back in the Russian market. At any cost…

It is a shame because Russian farmers proved that they could keep up with the demand of chicken.

The American chicken as per a good reader and friend named Blackseabrew who is in the business of farming in America says:

” ‘Modern’ poultry production condemns the poor chickens to living in their own filth leading to all kinds of problems from breathing in the fecal dust and excess ammonia. This produces a meat that is less than firm and very absorbent. This absorbency is terrible for us because of what happens when the chicken is cleaned. Because processing is highly mechanized…and frankly not practical for cleaning chickens….many intestines are torn during evisceration thereby soiling many of the carcasses, which are then ‘sterilized’ in a chlorine bath(better known as a fecal bath) which the absorbent meat sponges up for us to later eat. I believe up to 5% of the carcass weight is usually this chlorinated water. Yuck again. Just read what Joel Salatin has published about this.

Russia should not trust American chicken from the big producers. They have not changed anything in their production methods. Only the wording on the package.

Kyle, I’d be more than happy to send you some of my next batch of pastured poultry.

Below is a link to a video I shot of my automated chicken plucker I built a couple of years ago. It’s quite entertaining.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wuD_AJHKu0 “

That was a great video by the way. If you are a little squeamish do not watch it because it is a fact from a real farm. I was impressed with the chicken plucking device. Sure beats doing it by hand like I grew up doing…

We will eat only Russian chicken by the way. Unless we could take Blackseabrew up on his true farm raised chicken from America… 🙂

Windows to Russia!

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