Courtesy of UBC Archives

Every day, thousands of people are conducting research at UBC. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year in pursuit of new innovations in dozens of industries.

That money largely comes from governments, which have priorities in the university research they fund every year through research chairs and grants.

Industries have priorities too. They want their fields to become more innovative, more efficient and more cost-effective every year—and one of the best ways to do that is by funding research projects at universities.

But what happens when the goals of a university come into conflict with the goals of an industry? That tension is at the forefront of the story of UBC poultry science.

The retirement of the last poultry researcher at UBC has resulted in the dismantling of a program that has studied chickens for almost a century.

Since 1917, the UBC poultry science program has helped BC producers to grow their flocks and build their businesses. From dedicated outreach aimed at rural producers in the far corners of the province to essential research on nutrition, chicken health and new technologies, UBC has been a valuable resource for the poultry industry.

But as of December 2011, the program is no more.

So why is it folding? The short answer is that its funders are no longer getting what they want from the program—and the funders are the poultry producers that have had such a close relationship with the program over its lifespan.

As UBC’s agricultural researchers have turned toward sustainability and animal welfare as their focus, some of the faculty’s commercial partners, intent on harnessing research to increase profitability, have turned away from the university. The demise of the poultry science program is a direct result of this.

And with avian flu concerns as high as ever, this is bad news for all of us.

95 years of chicken studies

The UBC poultry science program went through various name changes over the years.

When it began in 1917, it was the department of poultry husbandry. In 1955 it became the department of poultry science, and 30 years later it merged into the department of animal science.

All of this took place in the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, which in 1997 was renamed the Faculty of Land and Food Systems (LFS). The new name was meant to reflect a progressive and innovative perspective on food systems, including a new focus on sectors like food storage, processing and distribution.

“I think with the new name [LFS], we attracted a lot more students,” says Kim Cheng, who was the last UBC poultry specialist and retired in December. “These students are interested in things like biodiversity and breed banks, and we were at the stage where we could move things further.”

Until 1997, the focus of the program was largely on improving the technology and methods of the poultry industry. It worked with feed manufacturers and large-scale producers for research and testing, and most of its funding came from these corporations.

But LFS’s new perspective meant that the program’s primary focus was no longer commercial poultry production. Instead, it began to focus on sustainable farming and small flock production. Murray Isman, the dean of LFS, says that unlike the agriculture research faculties at many other universities, LFS largely doesn’t do “commodity-type food production.”

As it turned out, this was not a move the funders could get behind.

“The continuation of the poultry program is dependent on industry support, and without that support UBC cannot justify maintaining the program,” says Cheng.

Research with a goal

Bill Cox, the poultry health veterinarian for the BC Ministry of Agriculture, acknowledges that the change of direction made by the faculty dried up the poultry science program’s industry funding.

“The one problem with the way the UBC poultry science model has evolved is that it has gone away from the mainstream commercial production model,” he says. “What they are tending to focus on is small flock production. That’s fine, that’s going to feed a certain market. But you’re definitely not going to feed four million people in BC with that model.”

According to Stewart Paulson, a former poultry specialist with the BC Ministry of Agriculture, BC poultry producers have been well aware of UBC’s shift. The university’s recent attempt to finance a poultry science endowment chair with a focus on animal welfare and environmental sustainability didn’t go over very well with the industry.

“The message that I got from [producers] years ago was, ‘We’re not interested in a thing called a chair. We don’t finance chairs, we finance research,” says Paulson.

And poultry producers are accustomed to a particular research model.

“The role of research institutions is to provide the infrastructure to carry out research and to take to the industry projects that they think the industry might need,” says Paulson. “Or the industry can go to the university and say, ‘These are the things that we need.’”

In other words, the industry only funds projects that they particularly want. They control the funding, which means they control the research goals.

“Their goal is business, and their goal is money. [Producers need] research being done that will lead to profit,” says Paulson.

Once UBC stopped providing that research, the funding pipeline was cut off. The only industry money left is a $10,000 scholarship for graduate students to work on poultry science, but that money has yet to materialize this year.

Does poultry research matter?

The new focus of poultry science may have been inevitable. LFS graduate student Jennifer Arthur says that at a certain point, animal science reaches diminishing returns when it comes to increasing profitability; there is only so much money that can be squeezed out of a chicken.

Arthur remembers a talk by a leading poultry nutritionist with the same concerns.

“He said, ‘We’ve exhausted what we can do to improve the bird’s [commercial] performance through nutritional means, so all we’re doing now is tinkering,’ and the tinkering is almost not worth it. You can say, ‘We’ll try this ratio or that ratio,’ and change this or that, but there’s no significant difference in terms of the bird.”

With the chicken as the No. 1 consumed meat in the province and the industry working at maximum capacity to keep up with the demand, this might be a dangerous time to ignore the need for poultry science in our own backyard.

BC has been the only Canadian province to get hit with avian influenza twice. When Paulson was working for the province, he helped to coordinate the containment.

“The bill for the outbreak in 2004 was $380 million worth of economic damage for the province,” Paulson says. “It required that 15.8 million birds be [killed].”

Leanne McConnachie, director of farm animal programs at the Vancouver Humane Society, points to the influenza epidemic as one reason why BC still needs poultry science research. “[The province] spent millions of dollars compensating producers for the birds they killed. They also killed the organic stock that had no problems at all.”

She also suspects poultry producer subsidies are to blame for the lack of industry support for BC research.

“What’s the vested interest for [the producers]?” asks McConnachie. “They’ve had no downside, they haven’t had to cover the costs of their businesses failing. Maybe if they had to pick up those costs themselves, they would have gone, ‘Gee, you know, we really need to know how to do this better so we don’t suffer these multi-million dollar losses again.’”

McConnachie believes that university research in-province is necessary to promote the more sustainable practices that will help to avoid catastrophic disease outbreaks in BC in the future. Economic efficiency doesn’t mean safety, and the same methods that bring in producer profit are the same methods that mean diseases can spread like wildfire through tightly-packed barns. Chicken mortality can multiply exponentially in an instant.

“The competitive advantages of concentration to try to overcome transportation costs in the grain are overcome by the loss of productivity when disease hits…and 20 per cent of their birds die. So there goes all the profit related to the flock,” Paulson says. “There is a huge amount of valuable research work that can be done here.”

For his part, Cheng is also convinced that now is not the time for university poultry research to fade off into the distance in BC.

Looking back over the history of the department, he sees a new role for poultry science research to play. Historically, UBC has had a part in developing unsustainable methods now commonplace in the poultry industry, and he believes that there is something they can do about it.

“We should reverse the trend now.”

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