At just 26, Ivory Arden has already built a career the envy of many twice her age. Michael Barker hears her story
When you achieve a lot by a young age, you could be forgiven for taking your foot off the gas, but one suspects that won’t happen to Ivory Arden.
The Young Farmer of the Year at the 2023 National Egg and Poultry Awards might be only 26, but she’s packed a huge amount into a career that is already approaching a decade long, and she’s determined that she’s not going to stand still now.
Arden’s story is inextricably linked to that of her family’s Lincolnshire poultry business. The Chirpy Egg Company has only been running for nine years, after what started out as a farm diversification project with the distinct aim from her parents of getting their daughter involved. “Mum and dad wanted to bring me into the business, but I didn’t want to do livestock as it didn’t interest me,” Arden recalls. “Poultry was doing really well at the time and they wanted to diversify, so this was a great chance to get me involved in the business but also to diversify into eggs. We all did it together.”
Arden’s love of poultry started at a young age. Keeping a few backyard chickens, as a nine-year-old she used to hatch chicks and sell eggs around the village, cultivating both a love of breeding and a nose for business. The family also has a shoot, and as a teenager Arden used to help rear 4,000 partridges, giving her further exposure to the worlds of farming and countryside management.
As a young company, the Chirpy Egg Company has grown rapidly, starting off with one shed and steadily expanding to four, 32,000 free-range units today. As Arden explains, it was a case of learning on the go, improving from site to site and adding new technology as it becomes available, with a new fit roughly every two years. In addition to poultry, the family maintains its arable links, but it doesn’t grow anything, instead focusing on cold storage for other people’s crops and renting out land.
Arden is one of six siblings, with her three brothers focusing on operations such as renewable energy and cold storage, whereas in her role as farm manager Arden is the only one concentrating on poultry. Her two sisters are not currently working in the business.
Back when she was studying at Riseholme College as a teenager, Arden admits she wasn’t fully prepared to run a commercial poultry operation at such a young age. Fortunately, though, help was at hand: “Our neighbour used to be quite big in poultry,” she explains. “He happened to live at the back of the farm and he mentored me. He helped me make my first flock and it went from there really, and from then on it was just trial and error. You also get quite a lot of help from the breed reps and packing centre and that kind of thing.
“So after my neighbour helped with the first flock, we just went on finding out what worked for us. It was a steep learning curve and very challenging, as well as having to deal with staff. It was quite a lot of responsibility having gone from a job where I just did a bit of waitressing.”
Today, the Chirpy Egg Company has 10 staff and a vibrant business. There are flocks of Hy-Line Plus and Lohmann Classic birds, with each unit having 40 acres of grassland with a minimum of 10% tree coverage. The business puts a close focus on bird welfare, and is quick to revamp its enrichment in response to any issues and to ensure the birds have a stimulating environment. “We try to change things up so they are not as bored,” Arden explains. “They can get used to having the same toys and get bored after a while. So we use lucerne bales, packing boxes, colourful ball-pit balls. We’ve had random things like xylophones and little musical triangles, as well as flower pots and things like that.”
On the environmental and sustainability front, there are seven acres of mature woodland on one unit, with two others featuring young trees. “We do think about the sustainability side and we have a lot of trees and woodland around,” she adds. “With the regulations, obviously you’ve got have a certain amount of tree coverage anyway, but if anything further comes up that is financially viable and also practical we would try it out.”
All of the sites have renewable energy too, with wind turbines and solar panels on three units and battery solar on the fourth, while robots have been installed in all of the sheds. The company has explored the option of insects for feed, but Arden says the regulation around that approach is complicated and it requires the addition of an extra staff member, so that will remain in the ‘wait and see’ bracket for now.
As a young professional, Arden is more in tune with social media than some of her older compatriots, and has made the effort to show the industry in the best and most honest light in her online posts. Under the handle @thegingerfarmgirl, she has 1,141 followers on Instagram, and has posts about chickens, goats and sheep, as well as giving her backing to industry events such as #Farm24. In recognition of her good work, she was named Producer of the Year (over 64,000 birds) at the BFREPA Free Range Awards 2022, with judges particularly recognising “her dedication to educating consumers about UK free-range egg production, as well as her promotion of the egg industry through the use of social media.”
It’s part of Arden’s belief that education, in its various forms, is key to attracting new entrants into the industry. “People think of a chicken farm as a gross smelly place, and it’s not,” she says. “Teaching children is important, especially in secondary school, which I think is the key one. Agriculture as a whole just gets forgotten about in secondary schools and that’s obviously a key time for people to start thinking about careers and what they want to do. It’s about education and I try to use my social media if I can just to show what the job is about, even just highlighting that there’s so much more to something like a chicken shed.”
Arden seems like a natural fit for participating in industry affairs, and to that end she has just been appointed to the BFREPA council, in additional to recently completing the NFU’s Poultry Industry Programme, which gave her a taste for the political side of things through a visit to Westminster. “It’s an area that you wouldn’t really get to experience when you are just on farm,” she says. “I did find that really interesting and I enjoy networking and finding out other things from other producers. I’m definitely more of a practical person than I am about book work.”
Given she had already developed a connection with farm animals at a young age, it’s unsurprising that Arden went into a career in farming. She admits she didn’t know exactly what form that would take, but given she had a summer job at a small-scale egg packer at the age of 16, it’s easy to look back and say her journey into the poultry industry was inevitable.
Arden’s love of the farm extends to her free time, where she keeps goats as a hobby, with a small-scale collection of Pygmy goats and Golden Guernseys. She also professes to a love of the gym.
She says she was “taken aback” to win the NEPA award, adding that it was a moment to reflect upon what she has achieved so far and allow herself some credit for how far she’s come. “It’s just highlighted all the challenges and all the hard work we put into the business over the past few years, so it’s nice to be recognised for it,” she says. “I am proud of what I have achieved. My friends always say ‘it’s great what you do’, but I don’t really appreciate it sometimes. I say to them that this is all I know, but then when I actually sit down and think about it, I think ‘yeah, I have done well’. I always think I just want to be successful in my line of work. I always want to progress in whatever that is and I like learning. I don’t want to be just stuck and doing the same thing without progressing.”
Arden hasn’t yet figured out what the next stage involves or what the end goal is, but there’s plenty of time for that. One thing is likely, and that is that in an industry always on the lookout for talented newcomers, she won’t be short of offers.