Pastured Poultry Plus

17 Feb

Our birds fully feathered and outside at just over four weeks old

To explain the system of raising chickens we’ve implemented here at Triffords Farm, first let me tell you about modern commercial methods in use in Britain today. Whilst many retailers and restaurants will proudly tell you they sell only 100% British chicken, if this is the best they can say then it’s really very sad because the fact of it is that our standards aren’t the lowest in the world but on an ethical barometer they really are shameful.

More than 95%^[i] of chickens raised for meat in Britain live out the whole of their short lives in intensive units, that is large sheds with low light levels where any movement other than eating and drinking is effectively discouraged. Huge fans are required to run constantly to remove the concentrated stink of thousands upon thousands of birds. The law says that birds can be stocked at up to 39 kg/m² (and for economic reasons producers will always push up to the legal maximum – apparently the industry standard is 38 kg/m²)^[i], which equates to 0.05 m² per bird when they are 2kg in weight. To give you an idea of what this means, an A4 sheet of paper is 0.06 m², so each bird has a space less than a sheet of paper and thus it cannot help but be in constant contact with its neighbours. Sheds are kept almost continually dimly lit, which provokes them to eat more and move less and when the lights are turned off its only for four hours, which doesn’t give them enough sleep either (they don’t eat while they are asleep!)

I needn’t really go into more detail about intensive chicken production as most of my readers are probably quite well informed about that! It is however this method of production, along with the genetic development of the commercial birds, that has allowed them to be grown to slaughter weight at astonishing rates (as little as five weeks) and has thus made chicken the ridiculously cheap meat it is today (as little as £2.50/kg in supermarkets – for comparison, broccoli isn’t much different!) This means that the average British family now chomps its way through more chickens than ever - two chickens a week on average, which is more than 1 billion birds a year across the UK.

It is in this context of cheap chicken costing not much more vegetables that other production systems try to exist but for obvious reasons the economics are very difficult!

Within the world of intensive indoor chicken production, there are a number of badges and standards, e.g. “Room to Roam”, “Better Chicken”, “RSPCA Assured” and “Red Tractor Enhanced Welfare Assured”, which in my view lie somewhere between cynical marketing and genuine attempts to improve the welfare of meat chickens, albeit in extremely small steps. Tesco says:^[ii]

“Room to Roam chickens are raised to the highest standards of animal welfare, and are RSPCA Assured and Red Tractor Enhanced Welfare Assured. Our Room to Roam chickens are fed a high quality whole grain diet that gives a succulent texture. Room to Roam Fed on a wholegrain diet in bright and spacious barns for chickens to roam.”

The name and description evokes an image of a small flock of birds, happily pecking about for grain and roosting on straw bales, with skylights overhead bathing them in natural sunshine. The reality is basically just brighter lights, a slightly lower stocking density of 30 kg/m² (slightly more than the piece of paper then) and if they are one of the lucky few, they might actually find somewhere to perch at some point in their life.

The RSPCA Assured “Better Chicken” manual^[iii] says the minimum light level should be “At least 50 lux of light, including natural light.” For comparison 50 lux is about as bright as the average British living room in the evening, whereas natural daylight outdoors on a sunny day is tens of thousands of lux! It also says that birds should have “at least two metres of usable perch space, and two pecking substrates, per 1,000 birds.” Wait, per 1,000 birds? That means 900 of them will probably never even find the perch during their whole lives, let alone get a chance at sitting on it! Undoubtedly this is better than the base standard but I’m still somewhat saddened that the RSPCA would put their trusted name to something this unambitious. On the other hand, perhaps I’m being too harsh in my judgement as I do very much understand that it’s hard to move the majority and this is a [very small] step in the right direction at least¹. I’m happy to be harsh in my criticism of Tesco though – these small changes allow them to tap their customers’ feelings of guilt to bump the price up to around £4/kg. I very much doubt that the farmers are getting paid 60% more…

“Free range” chicken production covers many different types of farm all trying to do something a little better than intensive units by allowing birds the basic freedom of being able to go outside in the natural daylight, scratch around and eat some fresh green vegetation and perhaps the odd insect or worm. You may think that quite a bit of British chicken is free-range these days, after all when you go to the supermarket, they are there on the shelf, albeit in the minority. However, you have to take into account all the chicken that isn’t being sold as whole or portioned fresh meat. Think about the chicken dippers, the chicken sandwich, the takeaway chicken bucket, the chicken curry, and so on and so on. It’s all this other chicken, which is invariably the very cheapest stuff, that explains how free range and Organic (which by definition has to be free range) together make up less than 5% of the market. Free range is a term defined in British law but in contrast to the case with the indoor production, there is a wide range of practices, many of which greatly exceed the legal minimums. This is because many free range producers are aiming at the more discerning customer who reads, asks questions and has strong ethical considerations. However, there are also some big free range operations, which don’t do much more than the legal minimum and are also giving free range producers a bad name by creating environmental issues.

The birds get regular weigh-ins to monitor their progress

The legal standard for free range chicken^[v] says that birds must have “continuous daytime access to open-air runs that are covered by certain amounts of vegetation”. The size of these runs must be at least one square metre per bird and the birds must have access to these runs for at least half their lives. This last condition relates to the amount of their lives they spend indoors, initially as chicks – for the first few weeks as fluffy little chicks they could die of exposure if allowed outside – and at the end of their lives when some producers will confine them for a final fattening. Free range chickens even get a much better deal when they are shut in at night, with the amount of space required in their house being much more than intensively reared birds get their whole lives.

There is also a standard called “traditional free range”, where the outdoor space requirement is further increased to two square metres per bird as well as a few additional conditions, like the age of the birds at slaughter².

Organic chicken is the highest codified standard in common use in the UK and raises the bar even further to four square metres per bird outside space as well as additional welfare conditions. However, organic farming also puts additional constraints on how the land used by the chickens is managed (in terms of things like pesticides) and of course, on what the chickens are fed, i.e. they must eat certified organic feed – it is this last condition which has the biggest implication for the cost.

There is no doubt in my mind that the jump up from indoor raised chickens to free range, whether it be organic or not, is huge in terms of welfare. It’s very clear to me that these birds love being outside, scratching around, eating grass and hunting for anything else that might be edible as well as just relaxing in the sunshine sometimes, or making themselves a dustbath. It’s this ability to express their natural behaviours that gives them a life free from suffering and makes me comfortable farming them. All that running around enjoying themselves makes them cost more to produce as they burn up energy instead of just putting on weight and thus need to eat more during their lifetimes. On the other hand, running around means their muscles actually develop properly, which means they taste better, particularly the leg meat that becomes darker and more “chickeny”.

In practice, how well free range chickens fare depends on many factors mainly surrounding the type and quality of land they are allowed access to. The standard only says “covered by certain amounts of vegetation”, upgraded to “mainly covered by vegetation” for traditional free range, which leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The environmental issues largely arise when the principle behind free ranging is lost. If you keep batch after batch of birds on the same piece of grassland, it’s not fun for the birds when it turns largely to mud and weeds, nor is it good for the nearby river when chicken manure and topsoil wash off into it. This isn’t an environmental problem caused by free range chicken farming per se, it’s just poor land management, just the same as if you spread chicken manure (or any other fertiliser) onto arable land under the wrong conditions. Hence the land cover and way the land is rotated around (or not) in free range systems, as well as the stocking density, can vary hugely across producers.

Non-organic free range whole chickens can cost anywhere between £5 and £10 per kilo, which reflects the wide variety of practices and associated costs. Going organic takes this up to at least £11-£12 per kilo, mainly because organic chicken feed costs so much more.

Inside the chicken “tractor” at just over 5 weeks old and weighing about 1.3kg, this is equivalent to a stocking density of 6.5 kg/m², i.e. so-called “Room to Roam” would allow nearly 5 times as many birds in that space.

“Pastured Poultry” is a term that comes from the regenerative farming movement.³ As with regenerative farming itself, there are no legal standards or generally known certification schemes for this.⁴ Pastured poultry comes from a rather different angle than does free range, indeed the most common methods of raising chickens in this way, pioneered in the US, would not meet the standard of free range. Regenerative farming focusses fundamentally on developing deep healthy soils, which support high yields of healthy, nutrient-dense food, without chemical inputs. This approach didn’t start out particularly from environmental considerations but has since received a lot more attention given one of its main aspects seeks to increase carbon stored in the soil, which of course makes for less carbon in the atmosphere. As an aside, to give some idea of the potential of soil to store carbon, there is currently five times as much carbon stored in the world’s soil than in all the world’s forests combined^[vi]. However, the enormous contribution of soil carbon lost to the atmosphere through conventional farming and indeed the loss of topsoil itself (4 tonnes for every person on the planet washes into the sea each year) seems to me rather under publicised and accounted for, relative to more emotive issues such as cows farting.

In the regenerative farming context, “the power of chicken”⁵ is a great synergistic force for improving pasture, which is subsequently grazed by ruminants. In this method, after the little chicks feather up indoors, they are then raised for the rest of their lives in covered pens, called “chicken tractors”, which are moved at least once a day onto fresh ground. In this way the chickens gradually track across a field depositing fertiliser as they go.

A secondary benefit of the chickens’ progress across the field is that if they follow cows for example, they will scratch in the pats, helping to break them up and accelerate their decomposition into the soil, as well as snaffling any fly larvae that may be growing in them. The chickens benefit enormously from having continuous access to fresh grass and insects and worms and can derive a significant amount of nutrition from them. The amount of space each bird has in the pen would not meet the standard for free range and indeed this isn’t “free ranging” at all, it’s effectively managed grazing, in the same way that regenerative farmers carefully manage the grazing of their cows and sheep to benefit not damage the land. However the key point is that the space the birds have changes every day, which makes it more interesting and healthier for the birds than many free range set-ups. The combination of managed grazing and the omission of chemical inputs turbo charges the health of the pasture and the soil biome and moves it into a natural carbon sequestration mode, which greatly benefits the land as it also benefits the planet. The small chicken tractors pioneered by Joel Salatin in the US have since been scaled up on some farms to large mobile polytunnel-like structures dragged across fields by tractors but the principle is the same.

At Triffords Farm, we’ve kept a few laying hens for eggs for ourselves for a long time but I didn’t originally see myself raising meat chickens. I always wanted to keep geese. As true grass-eaters, it’s always seemed to me more environmentally sound (in our local terrain and climate) that we eat more goose and less chicken, whose diet is almost entirely cereal based (usually including imported soy beans for protein, which is something I’m quite uncomfortable with.) However, except maybe at Christmas, I anticipate that goose, despite its delectable deliciousness, will be an even harder sell than venison! Hence, I thought it made more sense to start out trying to produce a “better chicken” and maybe expand my range to geese in the future. Also being a keen student of regenerative farming practices, I wanted to see what the power of chicken could do on my pasture.

I thus built a small chicken tractor to a design by John Suscovitch. Designed to hold 30 birds, it’s about 3 metres by 2 metres, i.e. 5 birds per square metre. This is much more space than indoor birds ever get, even in Tesco’s supposed “highest standards of animal welfare”, but I wasn’t comfortable keeping the birds confined to such a small area on its own and in any case, I wanted to be able to give a simple affirmative answer to the question “is your chicken free range?” I also knew that I’d need electric fence to properly protect the birds, given we have many badgers and foxes around the farm who certainly wouldn’t pass up any chance of a chicken dinner. Hence I decided to go with the approach of setting up a larger fenced area that the birds have free range of during the day and I shut them in their tractor at night ⁶ . As well as moving the tractor along, I also move the electric fenced area – I found in practice that moving the tractor every day and moving the electric fence every two days works quite well. With some fiddling around on bits of paper thinking about the optimum ways of moving fences, particularly if I have multiple tractors, I came up with the scheme of using a 15 metre and a 25 metre electric poultry net together to form an enclosure 15m by 5m. The enclosed space is then 75 square metres so easily exceeds the standard for free range with 30 birds. I set up a second enclosure in front of the first with two more fences and simply drag the chicken tractor (with chickens in it) into the new space and close up the fence behind it. I then move the old enclosure fences to new positions to form the next enclosure. Although this approach creates a lot of work for just 30 birds, I do have ideas about how to scale it up (if I can sell enough chickens!)

One aspect I haven’t mentioned up to this point is that the various standards (free range, organic, etc.) have specifications about the minimum age of birds at slaughter (e.g. free range says minimum 56 days). This hasn’t got anything to do with depriving chicken society of an individual at a young age that may have gone on to be the next chicken Shakespeare! Jokes aside, this isn’t because slower-growing birds taste better either. This provision is there to discourage the use of strains that been developed to grow at outrageously high rates. These engineered super-birds can grow so fast that it can badly affect their health, for example leading to bone and joint problems because the skeleton growth simply can’t keep up with muscle growth. They are also lethargic, so are less inclined to “waste” calories moving around and can die suddenly of heart failure. They are basically terminally addicted to eating. On the other hand, it’s not really possible to use traditional pure bred chickens to produce meat birds as people did in times gone by. Although some of them can get quite large, nobody will pay the kind of money you’d need to be selling them for if you let them take six months to a year to mature.

Hence I opted for a slower growing commercial table bird strain generally called “Hubbard” (Hubbard is actually the name of the company that developed it with the french “Label Rouge” market in mind.) These birds are active foragers and thus suited to free range and organic systems and this seems to have paid off in terms of flavour, which everyone has been very happy with. I used feeding tables^[iv] designed for the super-birds but I knew that my birds would eat a bit less and take a bit longer to grow. I was surprised however to find quite how much less they ate, so expected them to take rather longer than I planned to reach slaughter weight. However at 8 weeks these birds were starting to get quite big. Some of the cockerels (just starting to crow) were becoming monsters, so I took them to be slaughtered and dressed at 70 days – the average dressed weight came back as just over 2kg, which would be sold as a large chicken in the supermarkets. I also noticed a marked drop in their food intake when they went outside (at 28 days), which I’m convinced is evidence they were deriving an important part of their diet from the pasture. They certainly seemed to get quite excited about chowing down on fresh grass and herbs and particularly enjoyed finding mole hills; presumably finding tasty worms and insects within them. So overall we ended up with large, tasty chickens at 70 days, which had consumed an amount of food that makes them commercially viable ⁷ . Most importantly the birds had a happy life and the farmer and his customers were happy too!

Footnotes

¹It’s all very well for me to talk about how things should be done but on my tiny scale of farming, I’m very aware that it has absolutely no impact on the majority.

²I’ll come back to that point.

³I’ll write more about regenerative farming in another post.

⁴Many advocates don’t believe that codifying regenerative farming is even helpful, as one of the main principles is about doing what is right in a very local context and rejecting blanket approaches and rules determined at global, national or regional levels.

⁵Richard Perkins is a regenerative farmer and educator in Sweden, who uses this term in his videos.

⁶Again, I’ve seen Richard Perkins use this approach.

⁷My “Feed Conversion Ratio”, i.e. the dressed weight divided by the total amount of [bought] feed consumed, was 3.6 compared to an indoor intensive standard of around 3.