During class on Monday September 10th, we had a guest speaker at the Georgetown campus, Georgie Cartanza, who is a Poultry Extension Agent. She talked about her own poultry farm, which we will have the opportunity to tour later on this month, and the other poultry industries located within the Delmarva (Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia) areas. Georgie Cartanza also talked about the evolution of the poultry industries on Delmarva including the six poultry processing plants which are: Allen-Harim, Amick, Mountaire, Perdue, Tyson, and Coleman Natural Foods.
Some of the other things that she talked about was the different types of ventilation systems and the types of coops and how they were evolved over the years. Examples include: natural ventilation (means that whatever the way that the wind is blowing that day will enter the coop from that side), open barn yards (chickens could come and go as they please),and the two story houses. I enjoyed learning about the different coops there are and was most impressed with the triple decker (aka chicken hotel). And one big issues that she talked about was for most consumers, when they see the weight difference between a broiler in the 1950’s compared to on from the 2000’s they instantly think that the farmers gave the chickens steroids or hormones. But in reality they did not. All the farmer did was select which genes they wanted to produce the biggest and healthiest chicken to meet the supply and demand set by the consumer.