Poultry
KEY
TAKEAWAYS
Serve chicken between May and December: Chickens are seasonal animals. In UK winters, they need supplemental protein – usually from industrial soya feed, which is heavily tied to deforestation.
Soy-Free: Look for poultry that is pasture-raised and fed on a soy-free diet.
The Soil Association Organic logo ensures good welfare standards.
Hens lay the most eggs March–August – so decrease egg consumption between Sept-February.
Use more pluck offal. Try out Leghorn Mince (Hyperlink to contribution) or protein made from chicken feathers
Poultry Deep Dive
As with pigs, the key issues around raising poultry are:
Feed
Manure
Animal welfare
Chickens don’t take up loads of space for the amount of meat that they produce, so environmental impact is largely determined by the management of inputs and excrement.
Redwoods Farm - Farm Highlight
The first soy-free, pasture-raised UK chicken farm, Redwoods Farm raise 200-250 broiler chickens for meat alongside cattle, sheep, laying hens and pigs. Their chickens are housed in mobile, open-sided polytunnels that protect them from predators and disease while allowing them to roam fresh pasture.
Although not technically free-range, they cover 10 times more space than typical free-range birds. Like at Nempnett (see below), chickens follow cattle on the land, and the leaves, bugs, and seeds they forage reduces the need for grain feed. The remaining feed, sourced within 10 miles and mixed locally, consists of wheat, rapeseed meal, peas, and beans.
The meat (broiler) chickens that Redwoods use are a breed called Hubbards 757, designed to roam free and grow more slowly (at a pace that is in tune with a more diverse diet). Young chicks are fed soy-free chick crumb, sourced locally but sometimes from as far as France, made mainly of wheat and maize byproducts.
Amy Chapple, the youngest active farmer in the family (at just 23 years old) keeps soy-free laying hens as well as pigs. The intergenerational farming approach at Redwoods builds social resiliency on the land, while multispecies grazing builds it ecologically.
Feed and Seasonality
Chickens are monogastric omnivores. In the wild they scratch for seeds, insects and animals (from snails and slug eggs to lizards and mice). These are all high-protein foods which they require to maintain body weight.
In the UK climate, chickens are seasonal: they evolved in the jungle, so they struggle to put on weight when it’s cold. To make chicken farming possible year-round, industrial farms raise chickens indoors and feed them soy, which is high in protein, to get them through the winter.
However, the poultry sector’s demand for soy feed means that its supply chain is strongly linked to deforestation in Brazil. The biggest barrier to sustainable chicken farming is, therefore, the environmental and social impacts associated with soy production.
Solving this starts with getting chickens out of indoor systems, where dry feed inevitably makes up 100% of the diet, and out onto pasture and woodland. There, chickens can meet many of their dietary needs foraging for insects, seeds and grass, reducing the need for soy.
Note: Pasture raised chicken has yellow skin, don’t be put off, this is a sign it has been eating plants. The golden yellow skin comes from the beta carotene found in the chlorophyll in grass.
If chickens were incorporated into horticulture and arable farming systems, crop residues could also make up part of their diet. In addition, fruit and nut fall from silvopasture and agroforestry systems, and food waste from manufacturing processes such as brewing (and catering food waste, if regulations changed) could be redirected to poultry.
However, chickens are still not able to meet all their dietary needs from forage and food waste. So, to be totally soy-free, some kind of cereal- or pulse-based feed is still necessary, preferably grown either onsite or locally using organic standards and regenerative principles. See this short film to see how Redwoods Farm manage their feed.
Going totally soy-free means that we have to return to a May–December season for chicken meat. This is because pasture-raised chickens who are fed beans, peas and fermented oats develop very slowly outside the summer months. Large Christmas chickens or turkeys are still just about possible for agroecological farms if some birds from the final September hatching are kept for 120 days. However, this should mark the last serving of poultry until the next season.
Hens also lay far fewer eggs when the light levels drop in winter. Letting them follow their natural cycles by creating demand in the months when they are laying lots anyway saves energy and feed inputs for the farmer. This means reducing egg consumption between September–February.
If done well, reintroducing seasonality into meat sourcing could help reshape cycles of supply and demand to match the agroecological principle of “less meat, better meat, switch in veg”.
In order to make our food chain sustainable, we do need to reduce pork and poultry consumption, and eat more veg. This is because the arable land used to grow feed competes with growing food directly for human consumption.
However, we don’t necessarily need to get rid of pork and poultry entirely. If we did, we would lose the farming niches of the “food waste recycler” and “biological fertiliser” that make farms efficient and effective by stacking ecologies and enterprising on the same parcel of land.
Nempnett - Farm Highlight
Nempnett farm is another farm that does soy-free pasture-raised chickens. They move their mobile “chicken tractors” around their land wherever the chicken manure is actually needed. This means the land doesn’t get saturated with too much manure; it is broken down straight away and feeds the soil life and plants.
The portable shelters don’t have floors and are raised up on wheels so the chickens can come and go as they please, even at night, because they are guarded by dogs. In this system, chickens have unlimited sunlight, fresh air, pasture, bugs and insects, with some supplemental cereal feed, 80% of which is grown locally.
The Ford family at Nempnett also run their chickens on the same land as the cows. This is a mutually beneficial relationship between animals. The cows are brought in when the grass is too long for the chickens and trample it down for them. The chickens get all the larvae in the cow pats too and in return scratch up the dung, which reduces the field’s pest and disease burden and makes a healthier space for the cows.
Manure
One of the biggest problems with intensive chicken farming is the pollution of rivers by chicken excrement. The ecological crisis caused by eutrophication has prompted numerous campaigns.
Again, the solution is to reduce flock numbers, and meat demand, and get the birds outdoors, where their excrement is evenly distributed, and therefore breaks down and fertilises the soil instead of running off into rivers – one potential benefit of integrating poultry into veg-growing and arable systems. Another reason for eating chicken seasonally is that in winter, the ground is much more liable to leach manure.
Welfare
As a baseline, chickens should be reared in outdoor systems where they can forage and express natural behaviours.
An active life is not only important for chickens but for the humans who eat them too, because it ensures the birds develop a strong carcass, which means it’s nutritious meat. Scratching and pecking in the pasture also means birds develop better natural immunity and need fewer antibiotic treatments. The healthier the bird, the healthier those who eat the bird.
Bird Flu: the movable structures used at Redwoods Farm demonstrate the possibility of protecting chickens from bird flu whilst still keeping them on outdoor pasture.
Know the labelling system
Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) produced a guide to Compassionate Food in 2012 that scored animal-welfare schemes from 1 to 100.
Chicken Eggs:
Soil Association 70
RSPCA Free Range 63
British Lion Free Range 33
Chicken Meat:
Soil Association 73
RSPCA Free Range 69
Assured Chicken Production Free Range (Red Tractor) 47