Summary

The chicken meat industry recognises a range of issues with planning and development, as identified in the Chicken Meat Program RDE plan. Integrity Ag Services have conducted an extensive industry review and consultation in the current project PRJ-010658. This Stage 2 project aims to move from ‘problem identification’ to solutions.

Our Stage 1 review identified high costs and variation in the requirements for poultry developments, which were sometimes >$1.5M for a new farm approval. Specific issues such as odour impact assessment are highly problematic. Consultation with regulators, consultants and industry members highlighted that ‘rules of engagement’ or a national guideline could substantially help to streamline this process. Feedback from regulators and consultants engaged in the development process showed overwhelming support for this approach, which has been successfully applied in the pig, feedlot and egg industries.

The industry has an opportunity to take the initiative and develop a guideline that will reduce compliance burdens (lower costs and faster development approval process, and reduced incidence of court cases) and provide better planning and environmental outcomes for industry and the community into the future.
The project will establish a specialist technical forum to address odour impact assessment issues, led by a nationally recognised independent chair. This forum will develop and publish agreed approaches to solving the range of current issues to the extent possible based on the status of the science, ultimately developing guidelines for odour assessment. Following this, a national guideline will be developed with broad stakeholder engagement.

Program

Chicken Meat

Research Organisation

Integrity Ag and Environment Pty Ltd

Objective Summary

This project represents Stage 2 of the AgriFutures project “Streamlined planning and development in the chicken meat industry”.

The project objectives are:

Address known cost drivers and issues with new poultry developments relating to the estimation of odour and separation distances by developing a nationally consistent and agreed set of principles for odour and dust modelling, along with the development of a separation distance (S Factor) formula.

Develop national guidelines for planning and development of meat chicken farms, and a framework for environmental management of meat chicken farms.