From Arts to Argi
Written by Emma Rose.
There is a morning dew in the air as the sun rises, ready for another warm day. A pale blue sky surrounds the summer-green leaves of Oak, Birch, Willow, DogRose, Field Maple, Hazel and Hawthorn. Brambles tease with fruit not quite ripe and apples and pears dangle with promises of good harvest. I take crisp breaths as I walk down the tracks to the chicken coops and wonder how my life changed so dramatically and how this is my third year of being a farmer.
Let me take you back…
For most of my career, I have worked in theatre. Not the hospital kind, the arty kind. I have been a technician, stage manager, lighting designer and sound engineer. I’ve worked on the most amazing gigs and shows spending most of my days, evenings, and weekends in a blackened theatre either making something look good, sound good, or run smoothly. I toured the country and settled in a theatre in Scotland for a while but the darkness and late nights and never seeing family or friends took its’ toll and I started to look for something else. I wasn’t in a rush to change career – it had to be worth it. Of course, next came Covid. I had no idea the gig I did on the 21st March 2020 would be my last but it was and it turns out it was the best thing that could have happened.
When I met (my now husband) Rob, I asked him if he minded that I had absolutely no experience in farming. I am (was) a town girl, raised on an estate in Wigan with very little concept of where my food came from. He said he didn’t mind. I had recently been the Chairperson of an Organic Allotment so I had an interest in food but I found information difficult to come-by and I didn’t always trust what I read. I had no practical knowledge of food on a commercial scale and how it got to our supermarkets. I hadn’t eaten chicken for a few years as I felt supermarket chicken had a bad reputation and I didn’t trust any of it. I found media outlets warned against certain foods but without actual information. For me, chicken was something best avoided until I could figure it out.
Rob was working with a guy called Fraser who raised chickens. High welfare, slow grown, organic, knew exactly where they’d come from and where the money was going. Bliss. I could eat chicken again and it was so good. Delicious and guilt free! Then Fraser (for many legitimate reasons) gave up farming. This was a blow to me – I’d just put it back on the menu. I was just moving in with Rob on the farm and so we discussed the idea of taking on the chickens and having a go ourselves. It would be my project with the help of Rob and his brother, Paul. This is where the adventure began and where I went from a long career in the arts to being known as “The chicken lady”.
We started off with 100 chicks. We ordered them from a breeder who delivered them in a little cardboard box. Tiny, one day old, yellow balls of fluff. Just like you see on Easter cards. 100 tiny beaks, 100 little shouts of cheep cheep, finding the food and the water that I had set out for them on the soft bedding in the brooder with the gas heat lamp on. The breeder said he had a mix up with his last order and could we take another 100 for free? They would have to be culled otherwise. Well, how could we say no? We had just doubled our stock. I was captivated by them. We paid £1 for each chick. So far, they had cost £100.
Unfortunately, that year, various world events put up the cost of feed to £800 per tonne. We ordered a tonne of organic feed. We chose organic because we felt it was the right thing to do. We don’t spray any herbicides or pesticides on the farm so didn’t expect anyone else to in order to feed our high welfare animals. Some chick crumb has a medication called cocciodiostat which helps the birds to fight infection. It means they grow more quickly as their bodies aren’t using energy to fight anything. We opted out of this. If that meant slower growing, so be it.
I came into this with very little knowledge. How long does a chicken take to grow to a size that could be eaten? 6 months? Well, it turns out that supermarket chicken is just 35 days. We keep ours for at least 70 days, often longer. This blog isn’t meant to bash supermarkets and I hope it doesn’t come across as righteous – we all have to eat – but I was very surprised at the whole process and other people I’ve spoken to were as unaware as I was.
When the chicks are really little, they need to be kept warm as they are unable to regulate their body temperature. This meant a lot of trips to the brooder to adjust the gas heater, going out in the middle of the night, the black sky and twinkling stars looking down on me as I walked by torchlight, in my wellies, down the yard, into the shed to see 200 sleeping chicks. As they get a little older, they start to sleep standing up with their little beaks buried into the shavings as if they could topple forward at any time. In those first few days, some of the chicks might not eat. It’s quite common for any that aren’t strong enough to die. However, I didn’t lose a single one for nearly two weeks. I was the best poultry farmer to have lived. I was sad when I found the first dead chick. I didn’t want any suffering for the animal I was going to eat and to sell for others to eat.
Of course, I couldn’t keep 200 chickens as pets and had to organise the inevitable. I phoned the poultry farm who would carry out the slaughter and spoke to the owner. I needed to know exactly how they were killed. I asked about the logistics of the day. “So, we bring them in crates to you, then what happens?” There was a long pause. “You want them dead don’t you?” came the reply. I confirmed that I did, indeed require the birds to be dead before eating them and asked how they would do it. Again, there was a long silence “We tell them jokes”. Honestly, sometimes farmers are difficult.
Up to now, we’ve spent £100 on chicks, £800 on feed and the slaughter will cost £2.50 per bird. Add in gas for the heater, travel, delivery costs, and time and you can see why the cost of the chicken is higher than supermarkets. But at the heart of all of this is we are doing it right and for the right reasons and it turns out our customers feel the same. In that first year, I worried we wouldn’t be able to sell 200 chickens. Rob assured me all would be fine, and he was right. By January, we had sold out. The next year, we took 4 batches of 120 chicks and still managed to sell out. I am always humbled and amazed that other people feel the same way we do and are willing to pay extra for what they believe in.
So here we are, back to present day in year three of farming and I am walking down to the coops to move them onto fresh grass. I do this every day. The cows graze the field then the chickens graze the bugs, worms and grubs that are found in the cow pats. As we don’t give the cows any medicines unless they really need it, there’s plenty of protein to be had. They’ve got used to the routine now. As soon as I lift the back of the pen onto the wheels, they hurry to the front; eager to find the best bugs first. The coops have gone through a few prototypes- bike wheels made an appearance at one point but soon buckled. Now the system is a bit more robust and we keep trying to improve areas each year. I moved to “electric hens” this year instead of gas and that has worked really well. The chicks love snuggling under it and it’s a bit easier to regulate the temperature in the converted greenhouse they are in for the first 2 weeks. The set building and moving I did in my old career comes in handy. Sometimes when we are moving cows and chickens, it feels like an event management job; I used to herd large volumes of people in outdoor shows through towns and in parades although I haven’t made my mind up which is easiest. I make a lot of comparisons with my old life. There are weirdly a lot of similarities. As I lean on one of the pens and look around at the fields and hedges, I smile. I know where I’d rather be and I think I made the right choice. Even if I am now called The Chicken Lady.
