RED DEER — Turkey breasts and drumsticks with bruises and scratches are unacceptable at the retail counter because customers won’t buy them.
“Customers are very selective,” said Doug Mitchell of Sunrise Farms, which processes poultry in six plants in Western Canada.
The company supplies retailers with tray packed turkey in the form of ground meat, breasts, marinated products and drumsticks.
This encourages people to buy turkey outside the festive season, but the visual quality has to be good, he told the Alberta Turkey Producers annual meeting Feb. 26.
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He said processors have also complained of quality problems such as bruises, sick birds, too many condemnations and animals being dead on arrival at the plant.
A quality audit was conducted from the time the birds were placed in barns at one day of age until they arrived at the plant.
The study worked with five farms near Edmonton and evaluated more than 127,670 tom turkeys that were placed from last July to October.
The final results will be released later this spring and will be used to improve bird health and welfare as well as upgrade the final meat product, said project leader Irene Wenger of the University of Alberta.
Condemnations and blemishes cost the Alberta turkey business $1.7 million a year.
“What is happening on the farm is leading to higher condemnations in the plant, so at the end of the day producers aren’t making as much money and processors aren’t making as much money,” said Wenger.
“We were looking specifically at downgrades, but we were not necessarily looking at things that happened to the birds in transit.”
Factors such as relative humidity, ambient air temperature and floor temperature were measured in the brooder and grower barns.
Ammonia levels were also measured. Litter samples were collected, frozen and analyzed later for pathogens.
Preliminary analysis of environmental conditions in barns found a lot of variability in air temperatures and humidity levels.
The quality of poults was assessed. Beak and snood trims were evaluated, navels were checked to make sure they were healing properly, feet were assessed and down was expected to be clean and dry.
Producers were asked to store dead poults so post mortems could be done to see why they died.
The audit also monitored outside temperature when birds were loaded for processing and noted whether the farmers or a catching crew loaded the birds. Length of loading time was also monitored.
Birds from these farms were identified at the processing plant, where blood samples were collected to look for a number of diseases including the chronic respiratory infection airsacullitis. Studies have found that this disease is responsible for 15 to 35 percent of all condemnations.
The birds were checked for breast buttons and blisters. The size of the blemish was correlated to whether it was the size of a dime, quarter or toonie.
The audit also collected 100 feet and scored them for health.
Wing bruising was noted, as was the colour of marks to assess the age of the injury.
They also collected past data from Lilydale on percentages of condemnations, dead birds, weights and sickness for later comparisons.
More than 2,640 poults died on the study farms, which were later necropsied.
About one-third died of omphalitis, an infection of the umbilical stump, 16 percent starved, 10 percent had round heart and 10 percent had no diagnosis. The rest died of other factors.
Of those that died, most were a day old and had succumbed to omphalitis.
