From teenage entrant with no industry knowledge to award-winning young farmer in just seven years, Jack McAlister’s journey has been a combination of personal motivation and management belief. Michael Barker hears his story
It can be a risk to invest in a very young employee. They could be too immature to take on a position of responsibility, show little interest in the hard work needed to support a small poultry team, or they even might progress rapidly and then leave for pastures new in an era where job loyalty can be in short supply.
But sometimes, the gamble pays off royally, and that’s exactly what happened with Joice and Hill, whose investment in Jack McAlister over seven years has seen him rise up from inexperienced teenager to winning the Young Farmer of the Year Award at the 2025 National Egg & Poultry Awards. Now, he hopes his story inspires other managers to similarly invest in young people at a time when the sector is struggling to recruit new talent.
McAlister started working at Joice and Hill in 2018 as an apprentice, having switched career from a job in financial services that was leaving him unfulfilled. “I was 17 and living with my mother, and out of the blue I said to her ‘I want to be a chicken farmer’,” he recalls. “We typed ‘poultry apprenticeships’ into Google and within two miles from the house was the Joice & Hill hatchery, advertising a level 2 apprenticeship.”
Though he wasn’t from a farming background, McAlister’s family did keep chickens in the back yard, and that fostered a love of the birds that encouraged him into the industry. That experience couldn’t prepare him for starting work at Joice and Hill, however, which he describes as “nothing I could ever have imagined” as he recalls the early days as a wide-eyed teenager taking his first steps on a new career path. “The hatchery was almost like walking through a maze, with all the air-tight doors and how clean it was,” he says. “It wasn’t what I imagined a poultry farm would look like at all.”
Starting on the line in the chick room, McAlister quickly made an impression on his managers and was promoted to trainee assistant supervisor within three months, moving to the take-off room. Admitting he had no people management skills and had never worked in any kind of supervisory role before, it represented a big step, but it reflects an attitude among the management of the company that if you’re good enough, you’re old enough.
He was only in that role for a year and a half before another opportunity presented itself when his manager went on maternity leave for a year and McAlister – still aged just 21 – was handed the opportunity to cover for her and run the hatchery.
Supportive management
McAlister is lavish in his praise of Joice and Hill’s managing director Nick Bailey, who believed in him and gave him the confidence to take on roles of increasing responsibility at such a tender age. Thanks to weekly check-ins, monthly meetings with management and regular coaching, he learnt a huge amount during that year and by the end of it was ready to take the plunge with a new challenge. And once again, the company came up trumps and entrusted him to take the next step: “The egg planner was retiring a year and a half from that point, and I spent a couple of days with him and realised the scale of the job,” he recounts. “I thought ‘wow, this really is quite intense’, but I had a year and a half to train for it and decided to go for it. He retired this May, so I took over from that point and since August I’ve also been looking after the hatchery again in another maternity cover situation.”
In addition to Bailey, McAlister is keen to namecheck hatchery manager Anna Brimacombe, technical director Stephen Turner and sales director Peter Cumbers for giving him his opportunity, admitting many people would have been much more reticent to hand over responsibility to someone of his age. “If it wasn’t for them actually spending the time on a young person…,” he says. “I came in at 18, turning 19, and I’m now 26. So I’m still even now considered very young to many employers. A lot of businesses would see a 26-year-old – especially in my generation, with the way we’re going – and there would be hesitation. But Nick’s put his trust in me to be in charge of the egg bank for the company. As a young person, sitting in front of a director and explaining why I made certain decisions – it makes you grow up very quickly.”
McAlister admits that some young people come into the industry without a great degree of motivation, but again, he credits Bailey for giving him clear goals and a progression path, and explaining where his career can take him if he hits agreed milestones. That included formal training too, with the company paying for him to do a Scottish Level 7 in poultry production. “The career I’m having so far is immense, but I feel like if it were under different management it would never have taken off in the first place,” he says candidly.
Things have turned out very differently to what they might have done in an alternate reality, and that also comes down to a feeling of pride in doing a job that really matters. He recalls answering phones in a previous job and telling customers how much money they had in their pensions, and compares that to the buzz of working on the front line of food production.
There’s also the satisfaction of being on a constant learning curve. “I very much enjoy learning,” he agrees. “I see or hear something, and then I want to figure out why. If there’s been a production drop, I might send an email to the technical director and he’ll sit me down and explain it. Even after seven years it’s still just as much of a learning curve as when I started. You can really throw yourself into it.”
McAlister believes the fact he came in as a ‘blank canvass’ that could be trained up from scratch was a benefit, and it would be wrong to give all the credit for his success to others. He brought a strong attention to detail to the table, and a fascination both for working with numbers in the office and getting dirty in the more physical side of the job. He lapped up every opportunity to train and learn new things, and was rewarded in return with regular progression opportunities.
With the flood of data and information that’s available to poultry managers these days, having an interest in numbers proved to be a valuable attribute. “I oversee the egg room, and the transfer, and I’m looking at things like short-term sales versus short-term production, analysing the performance of the birds,” he explains. “Why are they performing well, or poorly? Is this a blip? It’s all to do with the data they run into the business. I’ll create the plan for the entire throughput. We’ve got nine farms normally on the go at any point in time, so I’ll coordinate with them to make sure the hatching eggs are coming in correctly and relay any issues we see on the hatchery side.”
McAlister admits that for the first few months on the job the data “could have been Spanish” for all he understood it, but his natural curiosity for numbers meant that he quickly found he enjoyed the mathematical side of his work. The particular challenge of trying to understand why an egg is performing in a certain way and what can be done to improve it appeals to him, and he has gone on to create advanced Excel documents for himself and other departments to monitor performance in a high level of detail.
Products in demand
Joice and Hill distributes the Hendrix Genetics range of egg layer breeds in the UK, supporting free-range egg producers with a range of sustainable genetic solutions. According to McAlister, the high quality of the birds means they are in strong demand and driving a period of growth for the company. “The genetics of the Dekalb White birds are unmatched,” he says without hesitation. “I’m not a sales rep but there is no competitor to the Dekalb White that we sell. They’re on longer, they’re producing more eggs, they’re eating less food – people can’t get enough of them.” McAlister adds that the market is starting to show strong support for the white birds, and that means they have become a bigger part of the Joice and Hill business.
The poultry life
McAlister describes a career in poultry as a “lifestyle”, and believes he fits in because it was always a way of life that he was interested in. It’s early starts and long days, but that’s more than balanced out by the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing something worthwhile. “There are jobs that are just jobs, and then there are jobs that are feeding the nation,” he explains. “By us being more efficient, we can help people buy more eggs for less money. During Covid we carried on as if nothing had changed, because ultimately people needed food. So if a young person really wants to make a difference, this is a good career.”
Admitting that he may never have got involved had his family not kept backyard chickens, McAlister laments the fact that many young people want “Twitter-style jobs or to start a TikTok”. “It’s hard graft and long days, bult ultimately you make a difference,” he says. Having a good work ethic gets you a long way as a young person coming into poultry too, as McAlister can attest, and he’s been fortunate to have a supportive management team to propel him on his way. He doesn’t know where the future lies, but enjoys the intellectual challenge of learning how to do the job better, improve performance and be even more efficient. That may well ultimately lead to a technical role.
McAlister jokes that if he didn’t work at Joice and Hill, he’d probably have a hundred chickens in his kitchen, and while biosecurity rules make it impossible to keep birds at home while working in the industry, it underlines the fact that it’s so much more than just a job for him. Winning the National Egg & Poultry Award came as something of a relief following a couple of near misses in other awards a few years ago as a trainee, but again, even those experiences had been valuable in his journey to this point. “I’d had an interview with the board of judges and I ended up asking their advice,” he recalls. “I was sat in front of three people that are well respected in the industry and I said ‘what’s your advice to me as a 20-year-old?’ And I followed it. So to actually win has made it all a reality. I can see that I am recognised and it’s going well. I’m 26 now and seven years in, so we’ll see what happens when I’m 46 and 27 years in!”
Joining Joice and Hill has shaped McAlister’s life in every sense – not least the fact that he met his partner Victoria at the company. And indeed the award win capped a remarkable week for him, with Victoria giving birth to the couple’s first child just three days later. She had been determined to come to the awards night and support him despite being eight-and-a-half months pregnant. “So I got two congratulations from Nick that week!” he laughs.
In a career that’s already had plenty of highlights, that’ll certainly take some beating.