Wichmann ducks

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The Wichmann Enten GmbH , headquartered in Wachenroth , district Warmersdorf in Erlangen in Bavaria is one of the most fattening of ducks in Europe.

structure

The Wichmann company holds the entire value chain of duck fattening and the subsequent processing into poultry meat in its own hands, completely in Germany. The company is certified according to the IFS ( International Food Standard ) and DIN EN ISO 9001: 2000 systems . The company has 70 employees in Wachenroth. The broiler hatchery operated by a subsidiary is located in Ermke, Lower Saxony (district of Molbergen near Cloppenburg ). There are several parent animal farms around the hatchery. After vaccination, the hatched animals come as one-day chicks for fattening in Wachenroth or in Westerscheps in Lower Saxony (district of Edewecht ). In Wachenroth, the ducks are fattened in a total of 15 stalls. In the company's own slaughterhouse, also in Wachenroth, the animals are also slaughtered when they have reached a weight of around three kilograms. They are then sent to the company's own roasting facility for further processing, if necessary, and then to the company's own freezer (both in Wachenroth). The company's product range includes whole ducks, duck parts and various frozen finished products. Customers are both the catering industry and various supermarket chains. Parts of the range are marked with the German state organic seal ("Künast seal") as the criteria of the EC organic regulation . The veterinary control number of the Wachenroth companies is ESG 60.

Competitors

The only noteworthy remaining German competitor of "Wichmann Enten GmbH" is Wiesenhof Entenspezialitäten GmbH & Co KG (formerly BBSK duck slaughterhouse) in Grimme (Saxony-Anhalt).

history

The Wichmann family has been fattening poultry since 1934. In 1967 a poultry breeding facility was built in Wachenroth. Between 1986 and 1993, the company, at that time still managed by Günther Wichmann, came under criticism from animal welfare and environmental organizations: They accused Wichmann of, among other things, illegal buildings, tons of slaughterhouse waste in the forest, water pollution from unsuitable sewage treatment plants, exceeding the approved number of animal places, later torturous Animal transports , violations of labor law, physical attacks on journalists, conservationists and affected citizens. In 1998, two employees of the poultry slaughterhouse died of parrot disease .

At the end of the 1990s, the Wichmann company ran into economic difficulties, filed for bankruptcy in 1998 and briefly revived under the name “Gepro Geflügel-Produktions-Gesellschaft mbH”. In 2001, the Nuremberg Regional Court confirmed that the Bund Naturschutz in Bayern (BN) was allowed to call Gepro “animal-torturing mass animal husbandry” .

Today, the sons Horst Wichmann (manager of the operations in Bavaria) and Dieter Wichmann (manager of the operations in Westerscheps and Ermke), as well as the daughter Annette Wichmann (manager of the sales and marketing departments) run the successor company under the name "Wichmann Enten GmbH". The Westerscheps location was taken over at the beginning of 2005 by the Stolle Group (Georg Stolle GmbH, brand “Bölts”) that went bankrupt in April 2004.

2007 bird flu outbreak

On August 24, 2007, in the course of regular examinations on five chicks from the company's own hatchery in Lower Saxony, an infection with the H5 virus was discovered in one of the company's Wachenrother fattening houses. In further investigations, the virus has now also been detected in animals from two other Wachenroth stables owned by the company. Shortly afterwards, animals around four weeks old died on farm 400 in a barn occupied by a total of 44,000 chicks. According to the Federal Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, this was "by far the most serious case in Germany so far"

On August 25 and 26, 2007, in response to an order from the Erlangen District Office, all 166,000 ducks and young animals housed in Wachenroth by the company were killed in mobile culling facilities of the Free State of Bavaria (the chicks by gasification with carbon dioxide, the early fattening ducks by an electric surge in the water bath), the largest culling campaign in Germany to date.

The Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut , which was switched on after the bird flu infection was discovered, confirmed the highly contagious variant of the virus ( Influenza A / H5N1 ) shortly thereafter . The source of the infection is still unclear. No abnormalities were discovered in the hatchery and three other stables examined in Lower Saxony. Since several wild birds in the Erlangen-Höchstadt district died of bird flu in March 2006 and the area was declared a “risk area”, a hygiene lock was set up at the entrance to the Wachenroth facility, and later a voluntary restricted area around it. Official veterinarians had therefore attested the company “exemplary hygiene” before the outbreak of bird flu. As a result of precautionary deterrence measures, there are no more wild water fowl in the immediate vicinity.

At the same time as the culling, the sale of all products of the company from Wachenroth stored after July 31 was prohibited, and the ducks delivered afterwards were recalled by the company. The municipalities of Wachenroth, Lonnerstadt and Vestenbergsgreuth in the Erlangen-Höchstadt district have been declared a restricted area by the district administration. There is a ban on poultry transport within 13 kilometers of the Wichmann poultry farm.

After an H5 virus variant was also discovered on two duck fattening farms in Trumling near Nittenau and Hofing near Bruck in the Upper Palatinate (both in the Schwandorf district, Bavaria, about 150 km from Wachenroth) (there was a definite positive result for the highly pathogenic variant not, only in one sample the presence of the H5N1 virus could not be ruled out, and the clinical picture had not occurred there so far), an even larger culling campaign was initiated on September 8, 2007, which with the help of two additional mobile culling systems from Lower Saxony around again 205,000 ducks comprised (28,000 animals on the smaller farm, 177,000 on the larger one). The companies affected are subsidiaries of Wichmann Enten GmbH. No virus was detected in around 20 other checked establishments that had contact with establishments belonging to the Wichmann Group.

A few days later, around 41,000 ducks from a fattening farm in Dietersburg, Lower Bavaria, in the Rottal-Inn district were killed because a low-pathogenic H5 virus variant was detected in the flock. In another fattening farm in the Lower Bavarian town of Simbach , district of Dingolfing-Landau, low-pathogenic H5 flu viruses were again detected on September 14th, which experts believe could quickly mutate into highly pathogenic pathogens, so all around 26,000 animals were also killed there as a precaution. Both fattening farms did not belong to the Wichmann group, but had been in contact with the Wichmann fattening farm in Wachenroth and were therefore sampled.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Press release from the BN regional office ( memento of September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), No. 11707, of August 27, 2007
  2. ^ Animal welfare organization "Vier Pfoten" ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), press release from September 10, 2007
  3. ↑ quoted from: Süddeutsche Zeitung ( Memento of August 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), August 26, 2007
  4. ↑ Press release of September 7, 2007 ( Memento of September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Netzeitung ( Memento of May 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), September 10, 2007
  6. ^ Passauer Neue Presse ( Memento from September 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive )

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