By Tom Woolman, customer services manager, Annyalla Chicks
I was having a discussion recently with someone about keeping farms clean and tidy.
I remember, when I was a wet-eared student at Harper Adams, we had Faccenda agriculture director Reg Smith come and deliver a talk to students about the broiler sector. In a well conceived initiative, the lecturers had stepped back and selected some doyens of industry to present to the students.
We had Elwyn Griffiths, Andy Ballantyne, Justin Emery and Reg all giving over a couple of hours to share what they did in the poultry sector.
Reg had a slide on his Powerpoint which I still remember. He said he could go into the office, the canteen and the toilet on a farm, and judging by what he saw there he could make a clear prediction what the standard of the birds would be like.
Now, a well kept farm is a thing to behold.
Reg’s message stayed with me and its one that I’ve heard repeated many times over the years. Of course, as I continue to visit more farms and my hair continues to thin, I have been surprised by the number of times when this hypothesis has been found turned on its head.
I get a genuine smile when I go to a site that bucks the trend. The farm could be very rough around the edges. Maybe you have to move three years worth of feed samples in the office before you can site down. The walls are plastered with every certificate the farmer has received in the last 25 years. Perhaps the grass grows like some sort of temperate rainforest between the houses, or the roofs are covered with moss like a big green duvet.
Sometimes, despite these impressions, when you walk inside the poultry house you find an environment where the focus is entirely on the birds. High performance and bird welfare are working hand in hand. The manager may have scruffy overalls, but you realise they are completely passionate about the job they do, and they couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
That said, this is the exception rather than the rule. Clean and tidy farms almost always produce better chicken, have fewer accidents and save time when you want to get jobs done. But my advice would be when you are visiting a farm you need to leave any baked in assumptions at the gatehouse until you’ve had a proper look round.