Carter Farms has become a beacon of sustainable production thanks to a continuous process of evolution and imagination. Michael Barker reports
With every business now putting a focus on sustainability, it takes something special to win awards for your achievements.
County Durham-based Carter Farms – which picked up the Sustainable Farming Award at the 2026 National Egg & Poultry Awards – has stood out from the crowd by taking a longstanding company philosophy of producing in the most sustainable way possible and evolving it continually over time. It’s meant a slew of initiatives and new ideas designed to put the business at the forefront of modern egg production.
The history of Carter Farms goes back many decades, with the original farm rented by current director Hugh Carter’s grandfather, before his father bought it outright in 1980. At that time it was a 250-acre arable and cattle site, before the business went on to produce its first free-range flock in an old converted cattle shed a decade later. Hugh himself returned to the farm in 2006 after his father fell ill, and from there the business steadily grew. Today, following a substantial investment in doubling capacity with a new multi-tier shed in 2024, the company has 124,000 layers and 1,200 acres of owned and rented arable land that also produces wheat, barley, oats, beans and oilseed rape.
Sustainability is far from a new endeavour for Carter. The company first started mixing its own feed back in 2012 to support the building of a new 32,000-bird shed, and while Carter freely admits the move was driven by financial reasons as well as environmental goals, it put the business ahead of the game when it came to having a more circular supply chain. “My interest in sustainability probably started on the arable side,” Carter explains, adding that he made trips to the US, France and around the UK to study how different farmers worked. “The arable acreage was increasing and as we tried to upscale, it became expensive and we realised we needed bigger machines. So we converted to a strip field, and started doing companion cropping, reducing fertiliser use, cutting out fungicides and doing a lot on the nutrition side. So that’s where the interest in sustainability really began. You’ve got to have a sound business to be able to do all of that experimentation, and make sure it all makes sense from both a sustainability and profitability point of view.”
The arable side of the business is vital to the sustainability credentials of the poultry operation, as Carter had questioned the wisdom of having to play the commodity markets to buy in wheat for feed when he could just grow it himself. It led to the company mixing its own feed in its own modern mill and up until the recent expansion, it was growing enough wheat, barley and beans to meet all of its own requirements.
Environmentally friendly eggs
All of that good work has made Carter Farms – which exclusively supplies Morrisons with both own-label and branded product through Chippendales – a valuable business at a time when supermarkets are all competing to showcase the most impressive sustainability credentials.
In the last five years, as the race to produce net-zero eggs has hotted up, the fact the company mixes its own feed gave it the opportunity to trial a non-soya diet. The first phase saw a trial during the last 16 weeks of a cycle, gradually moving the birds onto a non-soya diet as they are more robust as they get older. “We didn’t really want to do it at the beginning of the flock and then be stuck if something goes wrong, so we tapered it in at the end of the flock and the birds transitioned well onto it,” Carter recounts. “The following flock we then tried it during the first 16 weeks, which is probably the most important time in the hens’ life in terms of putting body weight on.”
Again, there were no ill effects, and although egg size was a little smaller than normal, it gave the business confidence to push ahead. It’s now onto its third full non-soya diet, with the eggs going into Morrisons’ Better for Our Planet range. According to the supermarket, products in the range emit just 1.13 tonnes of carbon per 1kg of egg, and the line was awarded the BSI’s Carbon Neutral Kite Mark in 2023.
The sustainability drive has led to Carter trying a number of different techniques, not least feeding black solider fly larvae to the birds. “The birds loved them, but the problem was you couldn’t really get enough of them to spread across the whole shed,” he explains. “If you could practically grow enough and distribute them in the shed, it’s definitely a good thing. Hopefully we’ll get some dried insect protein in future.”
Another approach has seen the company giving the birds a quite intensive nutritional programme from the start, with calcium-based products to improve bone structure and essential oils to reduce stress. There’s also a push – gathered from its experiences with the non-soya birds – to increase the fibre content in diets across the board, and it’s yielded some eye-catching results. The non-soya diets range from 6.04 to 5.92% fibre, while the conventional soya diet ranges from 3.7 to 4%: apart from the non-soya diet, all of the conditions from rearing to lighting remain the same. “We’ve found the non-soya diet birds maintain feather so much more – you would think they are 28 weeks younger when you walk in the shed and look at the feather cover,” Carter reveals. Now, the goal is to build up the fibre content in all of the birds’ diets – a process that is a much more delicate balancing act than it sounds. “We getting up to around 4.6% crude fibre in all our other diets at the moment, so that’s a big push right now,” he says.
There’s a focus on bird health too, with Carter trialling putting pre-encapsulated organic acid into the feed to improve gut health and nutrient internalisation. The idea is that it reduces bacteria and moulding and leads to a stronger, more robust bird.
So do such encouraging results lead Carter to believe soya can eventually be successfully replaced in diets? “Obviously it does cost more – about 8p a dozen extra to feed a non-soya diet – and egg size is generally 1-1.5g below the conventional diet,” he says. “So there’s a financial hit there because you get paid more for bigger eggs. But we do get a bonus that covers the cost of doing it.”
Morrisons has stressed that biodiversity forms a key part of the emissions-reduction programme that it is working closely on with producers, and it’s an area where Carter Farms particularly excels. No less than 5,000 trees have been planted, in addition to hedges around the ranges, herbal lays and wildflower mixes. “You take a bit of land out and put it into a scheme that does a bit of everything in terms of sustainability and biodiversity,” he notes. That work is in addition to renewable energy initiatives like the fact that the newest shed has a 350kW solar system on the top that produces 50% of the site’s electricity needs. Carter’s keen to put further solar up on the rest of the sheds too, and adds that the array is all ready for a battery storage system once they become financially viable.
Where there’s muck there’s brass
A further area that Carter has put a lot of focus into is how the business handles muck – an issue that has become even more pressing as it has expanded its operations. “It’s good stuff, but it does take quite some management in terms of storage and drying,” he explains. “I don’t like leaving muck outside as it’s not good for the environment or your fields, so we keep it all indoors and dried. With the new shed, which is in four quads, we put a big central corridor all the way down the length of the shed in the middle, and I went across to Holland and did some scouting around looking at manure dryers. I installed a Dorset GM machine, and came up with the idea of putting this central corridor in and putting the dryer in the middle of the 4 x 16,000-bird shed, and then instead of the ventilation going through the roof, it goes into a pressure chamber and forces it through the manure dryer. We have a building system that automatically runs the muck belt twice a day onto the top of the manure dryer. The air is pushed through the hole and dries the manure.”
Using the equipment, which has fully automated controls, means that unlike some sites that can have muck sitting out for five or six days, running the process twice a day keeps the atmosphere in the shed much better. “I was originally concerned about running it once a day and it not drying the muck, but even running it twice a day, it dries it perfectly,” he says. The advantages of drying muck straight away is not having the smell associated with wet manure, and reducing the need to move it around the site.
The approach has seen the proportion of dry matter in the muck shooting up from 35% previously to 89% now. That opens up more options in terms of bagging it and selling it to garden centres, or using it as an alternative to artificial fertiliser in the arable operations. Again, it’s about creating a circular economy that has both financial and environmental benefits.
The drive towards sustainability and net zero sounds like a lot of work, and involves taking a holistic view of the farm. It’s also about walking before you try to run: “You’ve got to start with the basics,” Carter says. “A lot of people do this and that and try everything at once and don’t get what they want out of it. I did it myself – when we started mixing we tried putting all this fancy stuff into the feed, and suddenly the saving on the mixing is gone, and you’ve thrown three or four products in and you don’t really know what’s doing any good. So for probably 10 years we just focused on producing a good ration with basic ingredients, and then making sure the water was clean. Now we can start adding stuff like the organic acid and so on.”
Next for Carter Farms on the investment side is more solar, the addition of another manure dryer, upgrading an old flat deck to a multi-tier, and continuing to pursue the “holy grail” of extending the life of the flock. The business even has a sideline in holiday letting, which it operates on a nearby farm that it owns and is run by Carter’s wife.
It is, as it always has been, a case of looking for opportunities to continually improve the way the business operates. Carter is an ideas man, and one suspects he won’t stop thinking of innovative approaches to take his farm to the next level.