We Brits love chicken. I mean really love it: 95 per cent of us have it twice a week (at least) and in the UK, over a billion birds are slaughtered every year (74 billion globally).
But more than nine out of 10 of these chickens here are bred to grow too quickly and reared in stark, dimly-lit and overcrowded conditions. They have little room to move around freely and perform natural behaviours such as perching and preening. Their intensification is also (as Wicked Leeks has reported previously) partly to blame for our dirty, dying rivers.
“These birds are not having a great time […] in these systems,” explained Claire Hill from Impeckable Poultry on the ‘Investing in regenerative agriculture and food’ podcast recently, but because of the ubiquity of chicken in our shops, in our sandwiches, in our takeouts and in our Sunday roasts these days the perception tends to be that “it’s all good”, said Hill.
It certainly isn’t. Animal welfare campaigners, sustainable food system scientists, supporters of organic farming and well-known organic farmers, including Guy Singh-Watson, have been saying as much for years. “Cheap meat and eggs are not a right,” wrote Riverford founder, Singh-Watson, in 2018 in a short blog that will likely turn you off chicken (especially ‘cheap’ chicken) forever.
Six years on and large-scale poultry production remains an ugly business focused on ruthless efficiency. A handful of companies dominate the genetics of the birds; and they have links to the commodity corporates that control the feed. Which means that even ‘independent’ poultry producers are anything but. “We need more diversity,” said Hill, because at the moment we don’t have it in the birds, the sheds or in the companies that control our chicken production system, she explained.
Hill and her business partner Annie Rayner are hell-bent on delivering diversity to a sector desperately in need of it. Together they run Planton Farm. Set among 80 acres of ancient trees and rolling pastureland in Shropshire, the working regenerative mixed farm is home to Impeckable Poultry – which they bill as “a blueprint for deeply regenerative poultry production that could be adopted by any farm”.
Almost everyone I approached for this article pointed me in their direction (and anyone interested to dive deeper should definitely check out the podcast mentioned above).
First though, a spoiler alert: “We don’t know what a regenerative chicken looks like yet,” Rayner tells me. Indeed, their work – like others operating in this new space – is very much seeking to understand what regenerative systems look like and how chickens fit into that (if at all). “Chicken might not even be appropriate for the UK environment,” says Rayner, admitting that is a hard concept to swallow.
Ruffling feathers
Despite being softly spoken Rayner is not afraid to criticise the current system, and she clearly cherishes chickens; as does Hill. They talk about their charismatic nature and the veracious appetite of the birds on their farm as they devour insects (and even the occasional small rodent!) and largely shun more traditional feed.
Free-range chickens may well have a decent enough life but they’re still likely fed on soy. The current systems, and the birds bred for them, are reliant on soy, the production of which can have major impacts overseas (think about its link to deforestation) and at home (the issues with poultry poo washing into local rivers). Which is why at Panton they are looking at substitutes like fermented feeds and sprouting grains. These are currently “a lot of hard work. We want to figure out some of these things to make it easier for others,” Hill explains.
Impeckable is not the only approach to more regenerative production of chickens and eggs. All over there are concepts that aim (and claim) to create ‘better’ birds – Pasturebird, Vital Farms, Redwoods Farm, Kipster and Tree-Range Farms to name a few. “We are here to change the system, not tweak it so it appears better,” says Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, CEO at Tree-Range farms.
Haslett-Marroquin has set out his concept in a chapter of the new book, Regenerative farming and sustainable diets (human, animal and planetary health. The design work started in 2007 with the question: what would a production unit look like from a chicken’s perspective? “Our fundamental principle is that chickens are meant to be outdoors and under the canopy […] the trees and bushes of the jungle,” he writes. The point at which the chickens are observed to behave just like jungle fowl – their wild ancestors – is the key indicator of success; and this sees Haslett-Marroquin “argue with authority that the food we harvest is an ecosystem service”. Nutrient density base-lining is also producing some positive trends when compared with conventional birds too.
In a call with Wicked Leeks from the US Haslett-Marroquin rails against those who are “raking in” the riches while making the world a poorer, more polluted place – and still claiming their processes and products are regenerative. “It has nothing to do with regeneration … it’s to make a buck,” he says of those already marketing such products at scale. “You have been sold fake claims in exchange for your money,” he warns.
The regeneration gain
One of my local coffee shops is selling cookies made with regenerative flour. There are also beers claiming to be made from regenerative barley, plus burger and pizza chains that make similar claims about their beef patties and pizza bases. There are undoubtedly those making progress and with good intentions too; but marketing this at us in supermarkets and restaurants is like putting the chicken before the egg (or is it the egg before the chicken?).
Eggs are another area that the likes of Panton are keen to explore as they investigate so-called ‘dual-purpose’ birds i.e. those reared for meat and eggs. “Ultimately we are aiming for a dual-purpose bird where hens rear their own young,” reads the Planton website. “We will require a few steps in between, and some trials and tribulations to get there.”
Indeed, diversity has been bred out of the birds available presenting a major challenge. A lot of the birds more suitable for systems integrated into a farm (for example, robust and keen to range) are not really bred in Europe or the US anymore, explains Sam Packer from the Soil Association. However, there is a lot of work going on in places like Germany and Switzerland, he says, which has been driven by public outcry over the culling of male birds.
The Organic Breeding Association (Ökologische Tierzucht, or ÖTZ) in Germany has been developing birds that are fit for dual-purpose organic systems. Instead of culling day-old male chicks, in these systems “rooster and hen are considered equal” with the male producing meat and the hen, the eggs. The birds also have larger stomachs, adapted to 100% organic feed. So, how do they perform?
A high performance layer will produce 330 eggs a year (but no meat), while a broiler will reach 2.5kg (live weight) in 7 weeks (but produce no eggs). In the dual-purpose approach there are 230 eggs per year from the female, while the male reaches 2.7kg live weight in 17 weeks. It’s a more “balanced performance”, the Association notes: the birds eat slightly more than high-performance breeds but can be fed with regional feed and by-products of the farm. “Eggs and meat from dual-purpose chickens are worth their price because they are kind to the animals and the environment,” ÖTZ explains.
There is, however, the price. An organic chicken or one of those from Planton is four of five times the price of a conventionally-reared one. What though, of the bird’s value? There is less impact on the environment and the birds have a better, longer life (much longer in the case of the males). Surely the 74 billion-bird question is (in the words of my daughter when we talked about this article): why aren’t the happier chickens cheaper? Now, that’s a plucky idea.
Photo taken by Emma Stoner, at Deapp Farm, South Devon.
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