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Voices from the Fields

Big Chicken - an NFFN farmer responds

England
food system
Poultry

Netflix has been making waves with its latest documentary looking at industrial, intensive chicken production. Here NFFN Farming Champion Clare Hill, who produces chicken in a nature-friendly way on her Shropshire farm, gives her thoughts.

Have you seen the new Netflix documentary where comedian Mo Gilligan eats chicken from fast food outlets for three meals a day, for a month?

Mo is initially delighted to be paid to eat fried chicken, which he loves. But while doing so, he travels from the UK to the USA and learns more about the reality of chicken production.

Big Chicken appealed to me for a few reasons. Naturally, because it's about chicken. But, also because parts were filmed where I grew up. There's much to discuss here. But I'll start with just a couple of takeaways.

Spoiler alert! Maybe watch the programme before reading.

Getting to the heart(land) of industrial chicken production

In the dark of night, Mo follows coordinates to Lincolnshire, which has the highest density of poultry farming in the UK. I don't remember ever seeing chickens outside in meadows when I was growing up there. They certainly aren't there now. This isn't because the chickens are reared on beautiful farms in other parts of the country; it's because they are reared in factory farms close to the processing plants, out of sight.

Mo is in Lincolnshire to meet with animal rights activists who are breaking into a large factory farm to get footage of what's really going on. No spoilers here, it's as awful as you'd expect. Each chicken doesn't have much room to move, it's dirty, some of the chickens are not able to walk properly, and they're not very well-feathered.

There's no 'probably' about it

Mo says: "There's a human part of you that says no animal should have to live and suffer like that. That's the chicken that I've probably eaten and you're probably eating, too."

What I would like to emphasise here is that there's no "probably" about it. That is definitely the chicken we're all eating (unless you're intentionally seeking out chicken from genuinely better farms).

I can't stress this enough. It's not that this is the 'really bad' chicken. In the old days, they might have said: 'Oh, that's the chicken that the discounters have, but we have different chicken.' Today, this is pretty much all chicken. This is the reality of cheap protein whether you're eating from a fast food chain or a supermarket.

I used to work as an agriculture manager for Sainsbury's. Part of my role was visiting suppliers. Every industrial farm I ever went to would only take me to sheds where the birds were a week old, so they were cute and fluffy and looked like they had lots of space to roam around a cosy shed.

After some time, trust was built and they would take me to a 'Freedom Food' shed to see slightly older birds where the stocking density is lower. But, despite repeated requests, I was never allowed to see a standard Red Tractor stocking density shed, where the chickens were near slaughter weight, around 30-ish days. I have no doubt that's because the chickens would have looked like they did in the documentary footage.

Corporate control

The documentary does a really good job of showing how big this problem is. We like to give supermarkets a bad rap for driving prices down – and they often deserve it. But, when it comes to chicken, it's actually the suppliers that call the shots.

Control in chicken is a really scary thing.

Mo reveals how one of KFC's biggest chicken suppliers, Moy Park, is owned by an even bigger supplier, Pilgrim, who are owned by the biggest meat company in the world, JBS. They own and control all aspects of chicken rearing, from birth to slaughter, from the feed to the size and number of chickens and the temperature of the sheds.

When I was in the midst of my poultry industry career, a decade ago, Moy Park was an independent, Northern Irish company and there were others like them. None of them exist anymore. Even in the last couple of years, companies you may have heard of, like Capestone and Gressingham, have been taken over by a massive French company called LDC, which has 123 plants in Europe.

It's not that this is the 'really bad' chicken. In the old days, they might have said: 'Oh, that's the chicken that the discounters have, but we have different chicken.' Today, this is pretty much all chicken. This is the reality of cheap protein whether you're eating from a fast food chain or a supermarket

Clare Hill

A handful of corporate players control the whole industry. They even control the messaging, which is why most people have no idea what's really going on.

When Mo interviews Richard Griffiths, the head of the trade association that represents UK poultry meat producers, the British Poultry Council, he asks him directly about the huge levels of waste (aka bird poo) from chicken farms and processing plants. Richard insists: "Oh, it's very well controlled. It's not a risk and it's not harmful."

After their chat, it comes out that Avara Foods, one of the companies Richard represents, is at the centre of what has been described as the UK's largest-ever environmental pollution claim, concerning alleged pollution of three rivers - the Wye, Lugg and Usk.

The mask isn't slipping, it's being pulled off - and not without a fight.

There's so much more to unpick in this documentary: the devastation to communities that live near the farms and processing units because of pollution; the human rights abuses because workers are denied toilet breaks and so reportedly wear nappies; the direct health impacts of eating this food – but I'll leave it there for now...

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