Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
318 Clare Hill and Annie Rayner - The counter-narrative to industrialised chicken: what does it mean to produce deeply regenerative chicken and eggs?
A conversation with Annie Rayner and Clare Hill, founders of Planton Farm, Roots to Regeneration and Impeckable Poultry, experts in poultry welfare and regenerative agriculture transition pioneers in the UK. We discuss where to start when you want to integrate livestock as a farmer. Many would say poultry, but there are a lot of issues, from lockdowns because of bird flu to feeding because these aren’t ruminants, so they can’t just graze, while another big one is genetics. We have bred birds to be either egg or meat birds, and that is incredibly inefficient and horrible for animal welfare. Annie and Clare are embarking on a mission to answer the question: What does it mean to produce deeply regenerative chicken and eggs?
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Where do you start when you want to integrate livestock? As a farmer, many would say poultry. We've all seen the Joel Salatin or Richard Perkins style chicken caravans and, if you haven't Google them, eggs and chicken meat are a great, fast cash flow generating enterprise. But there are a lot of issues, from lockdowns because of bird flu to feed because these aren't ruminants, so they cannot just graze. And another big one genetics. We've bred birds to be either egg or meat birds and that's incredibly inefficient and horrible for animal welfare. So today we have two poultry experts joining us who are embarking on a mission to answer the question what does it mean to produce deeply regenerative chicken and eggs?
Speaker 1:This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast Investing as if the planet mattered, where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume, and it's time that we, as investors, big and small, and consumers start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community and so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you. If our work created value for you and if you have the means and only if you have the means consider joining us. Find out more on gumroadcom slash investing in RegenAg. That is, gumroadcom slash investing in RegenAg, or find the link below Welcome to another episode today with an expert in poultry welfare and behavior and a Regen Transition pioneer in the UK.
Speaker 1:Welcome, annie and Claire. And a Regen Transition pioneer in the UK. Welcome, annie and Claire. And we're going to talk a lot about poultry and really unpacking the role of chickens in our agriculture system, how it grew into this massive industry that has nothing to do with Regen and what it could turn into. Maybe potentially because it's not sad it's not such an easy, let's say, animal to integrate, as we'll discover. But I'd love to start with a personal question to both of you you can decide who takes it first and to learn a bit more about your background and to ask specifically how come you spend most of your awake hours to think about regenerative agriculture and food, and specifically poultry. What led you to I mean, there are many other easier things to do in life than than imagining reimagining chicken in in agriculture what led you, both of you to uh to this path or to this place?
Speaker 2:that's um interesting. So my uh love of poultry came first before my love of Regen, I think and it started when I went on my placement from university and I knew absolutely nothing about poultry and in fact I was scared of chickens, I didn't even like them. But I went to this amazing farm that Ruth Leighton and Roland Bonny were running and I saw what they were explaining about how a food system could be different, and using poultry as a way of explaining that, and so I just kind of fell in love with what they were trying to do. So I found myself becoming a poultry farm worker for a year through my placement year and looking after chickens and something I never imagined doing. But that's when I and I realized then how interesting they were and the whole food industry around chicken and eggs was, and I kind of that's where it started for me on the chicken side, on the regen side. It's kind of like fast forward, almost not quite 20 years, but was then a kind of it was water, like often people say that, don't they, like Gabe Brown, I think, says it's the water that gets people? And it was after we were lambing, it was after I was back on the same farm as where my love of poultry started a whole career off through the industry, working in retail, working on poultry, both on the welfare side, but also development groups with farmers, um and um.
Speaker 2:And I found myself back on the same farm, but lambing this time, and we'd had the wettest winter on record. Everything was underwater and we were lambing. At the beginning of lambing it was a nightmare. And by the end of lambing there were cracks in the ground and I was just stood there like where, where is all the water gone? I just don't know where it's gone.
Speaker 2:And then, um, it was a little after that, we started doing infiltration rates, uh, and testing, and we did the first infiltration rates on a field that had been permanent pasture for 20 years in an old parkland, um, and it took something like, um, you know, between 40 minutes and nine hours or something for the for the two inches of water to infiltrate into the soil. And I was like, ah right, that's where all the water's gone. It's not gone anywhere in, it's all run off, none of it's soaked in, and and that was like that's where. I think that was what one of the points where it kind of unlocked it for me as far as we need to do it differently, and that was because things were getting harder Every year, was feeling harder in kind of conventional farming terms. It just didn't feel like it ever got any easier and it felt like it keeps getting harder like this. I don't know if I can do this for much longer. And then I realized that and then it all started to unravel back, unravel the other way.
Speaker 1:Fascinating that the water I mean mean. I've heard it multiple times, I'm reflecting on it now, but I think more on the farmer side, and and inflection moments, light bulb moments, whatever we want to call it often have to do with water and drought, or the cycle, or maybe fire as well, I think on people that are not on farm it's just not so visible, unless it's like a flood that comes through your town, um. So it's an answer we've had before, but not so much from the people that are not intimately on the land, for good reasons probably. I mean, you notice when it's very hot and warm and maybe have a garden, etc. Um, or when it's, uh, extremely, extremely wet, but somehow you don't really process that. I think, um, but I think, of course, if you're managing the land daily, you will really notice the difference between, uh, way too wet and and cracks in the ground immediately, um, and very no, it's. It's interesting how water keeps coming, keeps coming back, obviously, like it depends sunlight and water and soil. That's that's sort of the cycle we we have and we have to to work with. But it would be good probably, if people not on the land would notice that a bit, a bit more. Sorry, I got an intention, annie.
Speaker 1:Welcome to to to the podcast. And what about your journey into becoming one of the leading experts on on poultry welfare behavior? And? And you went really deep on the poultry side, and and and didn't give up. Let's say, went really deep on the poultry side, um and uh, and didn't give up. Let's say, didn't step away and said, okay, I will, I will never touch anything with with chickens again. No, you decided to, to dig even deeper.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. Um, I guess, similarly, my, my regenerative journey well started kind of well. The chicken side of things started much earlier. Um. So I I did my undergraduate was actually in animal behavior and welfare and then as a graduate went to work with the same farm as Claire, um in Oxford, um with Ruth Leighton and and Roland and Bonnie, and kind of fell into chickens a bit accidentally.
Speaker 3:A lot of their work they had done historically had been with chickens and they became a really interesting and fascinating livestock species to to kind of further my research and understanding of the world, I guess, and what is really, I think, with the absolute numbers of chickens that are produced globally, I think my kind of maybe slightly naive approach was that actually you can, you can have a big impact if you make a very small change to, to to few to chickens globally. So, um, that small change can result in in large numbers um of birds kind of gaining that benefit. So, yeah, I started doing research, really in alongside Claire ultimately is where we met as well and then also started a PhD looking at commercial broilers, so meat chickens, and how to measure their welfare, very much through a kind of positive welfare lens, which is taking a similar approach to regenerative agriculture in that it's looking at kind of positive welfare lens, which is taking a similar approach to regenerative agriculture in that it's looking at kind of promoting positive outcomes, and so I was looking at measures to measure those positive outcomes within a commercial system, which is pretty hard when there's not many positive outcomes of commercial systems. So yeah, and then we started the conversion of the Oxford farm, which was very much from a beef perspective, and then eventually kind of thought a little bit about chickens but not really nearly as deeply as we are now and I really started down that journey of what does it mean to produce chickens in a regenerative way and where do chickens or poultry sit within a kind of regenerative farming system?
Speaker 1:and when did you realize or decided I mean might have been a a journey or path, of course that the incremental approach or or not the incremental, but the spread out approach if, if, billions of chickens have a slightly better life, that's a lot of impact. Um, or, like you, at some point you decided I want to to really go deep in what role chickens could play, but by definition, that meant working with less chickens at that time. Maybe the impact would be bigger over time. But it's a very different strategy concentration on, on a few thousand chickens and and see what the best could be there, or working on legislation, and you literally worked on that. That influenced billions of chickens and will continue to do so. When did that not? It's not a flip of a switch, but when did that happen? Or how did that happen?
Speaker 3:um, I think I think there's a sorry. Uh, sorry, we pause a sec. Let me just um, I'm very good at writing stuff, just to say not very good at speaking something I'll get better at you're doing absolutely fine until now.
Speaker 1:Take your time.
Speaker 3:So well. So during COVID we had a lot of family illness ultimately, and I think there was a realization of the amount of time that we have and actually that making these kind of small tweaks to systems wasn't going to bring about significant change and the kind of old I think it's Buckminster Fuller quote around creating a new reality. You can't work within the current system. It needs to be taken out of that and you need to be creating something completely new. So I think that was the realisation. We've made some good changes in all of the stuff that we have done in terms of getting tree cover on ranges in commercial systems and changing breeds within supply chains is really positive. But but ultimately, to have a um, a system that's really good for the world, that we really need, uh, that that that needs a complete redesign and a complete change of system so you came to that realization.
Speaker 1:What happened next? You called claire and said this is the question. All right, this is what. What, let's what, what? What was the next step?
Speaker 3:um, I think, yeah, we were working together, kind of doing little bits of consultancy, and I think it arrived at us very naturally and very gradually. I think we realized that no one was really talking about poultry or few people were really talking about poultry within a regenerative system. We're seeing lots of people interested, but maybe not so many knowing kind of what they can do and and also kind of doing it from the chicken perspective. So so I think within Regen there's obviously a really good focus on soil, but sometimes the needs and wants of animals might be left behind a little bit, such that actually, when designing a system, you obviously need to do that for the benefits of the soils and the ecosystems, but you also really need to think what a chicken needs. And that was kind of the perspective I thought I think we could bring quite uniquely to the kind of regen movement.
Speaker 1:And Claire for you. Why were you ready at that time to dive into that or to start thinking about and that's literally like the tagline of impeccable poultry what does it mean to produce deeply regenerative chicken and eggs? Why were you at a moment in that, in that time, um, where you were, were deceptive for that or interested, and not just keep working with this supply chain and this? There's a lot of work to do, xyz. Why were you open to it?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think, um, I had I think it was covid as well during that time we didn't have the illness stuff, but I definitely had that. What COVID did was really ramp up for me that sense of urgency of you know where we're heading and that we can't keep doing this tweaking, tweaking the status quo because it's not quick enough and it's not having the desired effect quo because it's it's not, it's not quick enough and it's not having the desired effect, um and so, um, part of that, that process for me of unpicking, that was realizing that in the uk we didn't have, we don't have enough demonstration places, um, for people to know, well, okay, so what do we do then? So it's not just standing on the sidelines and critiquing but okay, so how do we do it? Um, and so we?
Speaker 1:that's what that's how grazing it seems to be there right, like it's very interesting, like the ruminant side, and but how? Just just a few numbers like how big is chicken in in terms of diet, like just to, to show the neglectedness, let's say of of the chicken, uh, the regen chicken side that's a great question.
Speaker 2:So as far as um so regenerative chicken or agroecological chicken, we're seeing a great rise in um chicken tractors and that type of thing. But of the poultry industry you know that will be less than one percent um significantly less than one percent of the volume that is that is produced and um and also it's it's not had wide scale uptake and that's because I think there are still some challenges around it. So when we, when we first started the transition of the grazing the beef grazing system at the farm in oxford and we had poultry at the time, we'd always had chickens on that farm and what we realized that was that we had these amazing organic chicken systems but they were stationary in one place and of course, what we started to learn about regeneration was that they need to be moving around and integrating and not just being sort of siloed in one place. And we started to bring that about. We built a few chicken tractor um richard perkins design sheds um ourselves and that was great and we were moving the chickens around and they were getting fresh grass every day. We didn't have the rat problems that you often get in chicken systems. That was amazing. But there's issues over having a fully slatted floor. That means they don't have anywhere to dust bathe when it's wet. So then you have to add that provision in. When you get bird flu. We have lockdown. We're sometimes locked down for five, six months a year where the the shed design is not set up perfectly for that um, and so it's kind of like it was like one step forward, two steps back all the time.
Speaker 2:Um, and that's why, um, we, annie and I, kind of in our conversations, um, and also taking it as well, for me it's been the building of the farm here. So how do we create a, a demonstration farm about the art of what's possible when it comes to agroecology and livestock farming? Because we have some great examples with, like farm ed and groundswell, where it's an arable farm, transitioning in integrating livestock. Well, the majority of farmland in the uk, by by size, is is already under livestock management. So how do we?
Speaker 2:How do we? So how do we transition that? And so we're interested in the kind of inclusion of perennials in an existing livestock system, but also diversity. This is an 80-acre farm and the reality is, however good you are at mob grazing, you're never going to be able to generate enough margin to feed everybody from this 80 acres of land. So it's so important to integrate other um enterprises in which we do with trees and perennial market garden and annuals in our market garden too. But but chickens are a natural um, a natural um species to layer in um, and particularly when you take the sort of wild you know, know, wilding, almost that wilding theory of what would the landscape have looked like and what species would have been present.
Speaker 1:Because why is the chicken a natural and we'll get to where you are. But just to Annie, on the chicken side and the poultry side, why is chickens or is poultry a natural one to layer in? Why would somebody say that? And actually it doesn't make sense, like what's the rationale behind that?
Speaker 3:I think people really love chickens. They they are so um, they're so charismatic, and actually farmers that want to add an additional enterprise that's fairly small, that is livestock that they feel like they can manage quite easily. It's quite a natural thing to introduce. Also, people love eggs. You've got kind of direct, kind of really place-based kind of association with eggs. People like to buy eggs from a farm that they know. And then also chicken. People love to eat chicken. We've got a really insatiable appetite for chicken. In the UK we're eating about 35 kilos of chicken per person per year, which is a lot. That's not me, so someone else is eating my 35 kilos too and over 200 eggs per person per year. So there's a direct kind of.
Speaker 1:It's a massive piece of protein, absolutely and and so, and. From a chicken perspective and an ecology perspective, how good or not good is the rationale in like a farm of where you're uh, you're, you're building what does it make sense to integrate chicken? Think, does it fit in the way you're, you're potentially thinking in terms of, um, we know it's a jungle bird originally, like how, how well does it fit into a grazing operation?
Speaker 3:yeah, and I guess that's really part of what we want to explore. So we've called, uh, impeccable poultry for the fact that actually maybe it's not even chicken at all. Maybe we should be looking towards more kind of grazing poultry, so geese or even ducks, so we're not really sure. But because we recognise we're not going to turn everyone away from this kind of need and love of chicken, actually let's start with chicken and see if we can do it in a way that is beneficial for the environment and people and all of these things. So very much part of our exploration.
Speaker 1:And what are the big barriers or challenges with integrating? You mentioned a few on the design, but what are the big ones you want to tackle or will try to tackle with Impeccable Poultry? What are the big ones you want to tackle or will try to tackle with Impeccable Poultry?
Speaker 3:So the key difference, I guess, from the current kind of pasture poultry community, which are obviously all doing a really great job, is that we want to look at it from this dual purpose perspective. So at the moment we have two types of chicken. We have a chicken for meat and a chicken for laying eggs, and historically we would have had a dual purpose bird, and across a lot of the world we do have a dual purpose bird. So a lot of kind of backyard production would be a dual purpose chicken, and so we want to understand what breed is actually dual purpose as well. So dual purpose chickens really have originated as a byproduct of the egg industry and egg production generally.
Speaker 3:So when we domesticated chickens originally it wasn't for their meat. It took quite a few I don't know hundreds of years before we started eating them, but we were eating their eggs and then eating the cockerels as they were kind of surplus to the requirements. So part of what we want to look at is actually we know that chicken is a good protein source, but what kind of bird makes a good dual purpose chicken that actually provides a good meat bird as well as lays eggs? So maybe coming at it from a slightly different angle to what has done, has been done historically and is being done over in the continent, in terms of the kind of ban on male chick culling. Um, we're seeing a rise in dual purpose breeds, but again it's to to address that kind of waste stream within the laying hen industry. So not a true dual purpose bird.
Speaker 1:Because currently the males are being called or have to now grow up because there's legislation coming in. But of course there's a massive issue in the chicken industry with the males being born and basically be worthless for the sector Pretty much. There's some small initiatives here and there to grow them and eat them as meat birds, but they aren't really meat birds so they they don't grow to to that size. So you're trying to really flip that on its head and say what if you have a chicken and does eggs and the males actually grow into an interesting meat bird as well, which would like energetically make way more sense, simply from efficiency, from feed, feed, from what a system could look like. How difficult do you think that is? From the genetics You're saying actually there's a rise of dual purpose ones. How, how far or how do you even get to a duo, but you're going to test different ones. Is there, is there even a selection now you can pick from, like if you wanted to?
Speaker 3:so I guess historically there would have been a lot of dual purpose um breeds available, uh, in terms of kind of backyard chicken production. When I say there's a rise, I guess there's a rise of more commercial type dual purpose, which is is maybe not what we even need to look to. So, um, we're really keen to, to look beyond, obviously, just the uk, and beyond even europe. There's, there's um, there are genetics in in china and and other parts of the world that are forming these kind of genetic um dual purpose birds. So, uh, I think there is some, I think that it's gone. It's gone from a, it's gone from a large variety to then very few, and then I think some of that variety will still be there, but it will be in much smaller numbers. So it's about tapping into some of those as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so that's a big lever, let's say, to pull. If you can make that, you know, on a commercial, on, and the size, of course you are a commercial size, make it work. That would cut out a lot of waste, a lot of inefficiency, a lot of energy and feed and and a lot of, of course, animal welfare issues. Um, what are other ones? Um, I often hear the feed is a is a challenge as well to do that in a regenerative way. I mean the grazing side. Course you have ruminants. They could be fully pasture fed and so you're taking the grass, the sunlight and the water.
Speaker 1:What is that about chickens? I mean not the backyard ones where you feed a bit of leftovers and other things, but that's, of course, completely not commercial. I think Richard Perkins has written and shared about it often and that he's not the happiest, I think, with chickens. But it's a good commercial product. You can buy the organic grain and doesn't feel super happy about it, but it's a really good driver for margins and for the soil, actually the health of the soil. How do you see that? How important is the feed and what are you going to research there or try there?
Speaker 2:So I think there are currently farmers looking at, say, for example, alternatives to soya, which is really important, because if there's one of the components of chicken feed that is really causing a lot of damage is soya, both from the deforestation angle for where it's been grown, but also then chickens don't digest phosphate very well, so it ends up with high levels of phosphate in the muck. And we have, you know, in the UK only 14% of rivers with good ecological status. That's not totally down to chickens, of course, but there are some rivers where that is a high contributor towards the degradation of our water, and so there's things like alternatives to existing. But again, sometimes that does feel a little bit like tweaks. So I think what we're really interested in is, if we had a bird and we've got some on the ground at the moment, some from a kind of local farmer who's breeding his own how do they behave and interact differently with the environment? So they are up running around and they are eating seed heads, they're eating insects and they're behaving in a different way, and that's one thing to look at is how do we increase the biodiversity that's in our environment so that that provides more of the feed?
Speaker 2:Of course, chickens would eat a mixture of all sorts of things. We've even seen them eat small rodents before, so you know they can't just live on grass like cows. So it's, how do we bring that in? And waste streams of food are a potential solution. But I think also like current modern genetics have grown up side by side with soya. So I think when we unpick the the genetic side, we'll be unpicking the the feed side at the same time, um, and working out what works and also that balance of production.
Speaker 2:I talked to a friend who's chickens in kenya and he says they we don't feed them anything, but they only produce an egg a week. So okay, so instead of an egg a day, it's an egg a week. What does five eggs a week look like and what? What does the feed need for that and how does that? What's the true cost environmentally, ecologically, human, financially of doing that? And I think that's what we really want to explore and that's what's not really been picked apart and that's a really kind of like important part of the project for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let's unpack. No, let's first go where you are. Uh, claire, just to give a bit of um, um, grounding and context. Uh, you mentioned the farm. It's, it's a grazing operation, but just to, if we would walk around that there and we would do this as a walking the land episode, which we sometimes do, uh, what would that look like? What? What do people, should people imagine? Where you're going to experiment, where you're going to do this research?
Speaker 2:um, in terms of place, so, yeah, we're a, a small, well it's, I say small, small in farming terms it's 80 acres, huge. Of course, if you live um, you live with no garden, um, so we're a, we're a, a farm in south shropshire. We're just at the bottom of the um shropshire hills, which is a natural landscape, um, and and we're only just below the moorland line, which um, so, so only two fields above us, onto common land, where it's open, um, everyone has access, and, um, and and local farmers graze sheep and cattle and horses communally up there. So we're quite high up. It's quite an upland environment, something that you might imagine, maybe kind of lake district-esque, and we are, we're quite, we're quite hilly, quite undulating, and most of our land goes down towards a small brook, it's sloping down towards that, the the land is all permanent pasture, so all the land is all permanent pasture, so all grassland that's been in grassland for a long time and it has this feeling of it evolving to be wood pasture.
Speaker 2:So the previous farmer for us, he was quite old and he farmed right like so many do, farmed right up until his 90s, and what that meant was that maybe his accessibility around the farm or use of machinery in the later years was not as much. So we actually have a fairly wild feeling farm it's not being so well managed, which for some is not good, but for us it's been great because actually we have got quite a lot of kind of scrub and trees and things in the middle of fields which maybe we don't have. So it's quite a from a farming landscape point of view it's quite wild in places. From a farming landscape point of view it's quite wild in places and, um, and we're building up on that with bringing more trees in to kind of recreate open wood pasture as we think this land would have been and that's the home, let's say, of impeccable poultry.
Speaker 1:Um, how would you describe impeccable poultry if you had to like research project? Is that fair rnd? Yes and no? Uh, what's your not your pitch, but what's your, your um, and decide who takes this one, obviously um of impeccable poultry, and then we'll unpack it a bit more so I think it's both.
Speaker 2:It's. It's both uh, research projects initially, but with the view that we will come up with a blueprint, or I mean in regeneration, regenerative agriculture. We don't really want one solution. You know, that's the problem. It's not like every farm must do it like this, but a solution with a number of different options that farmers can or anybody with land can, and and build something on their farm.
Speaker 2:Um, with the idea that, instead of you know one or two percent of farms in the uk having hundreds of thousands of chickens actually, let's say, 30 of farms in the uk have a few hundred chickens and we spread the, the benefits of that um across the country. Um, yeah, and the and the challenges, um, but what the reason that? It's because we could just take um. You know, people know how to do um, people know how to do pasture poultry. We could just say let's just scale that right now.
Speaker 2:But I think with these issues we talk about around breed and feed, what we want to do is really kind of dig into that and resolve those. So what, where? How do we get to a point where, before we, before we um, before we grow it out and spread it out across lots of farms and grow it as a business opportunity for for many, then, um, we need to iron out some of these problems around breed um, for example, and because we want, if we're going to grow a business, we want it to be a business that is truly regenerating, so that as the business scales, it's having a positive impact at every, at every point. Whereas if we, if we scaled the um, the, the poultry system that we have on the farm here today, we would be scaling some of the problems that go with that. So we don't want to do that.
Speaker 1:We want to try and iron out, iron everything out first, make it a truly regenerative model and then and then start to scale out, but the idea being it's solutions um for helping many people um move in a more regenerative direction and is your thought there that by spreading out the chickens, or let's say integrating more chickens on more farms, that it naturally of course this is a very tricky question um will undermine, let's say, the industrialized chicken um industry, or will it grow next to it and we'll just produce more chicken with the same amount of issues, at least on the industrial side?
Speaker 2:yeah, I've, maybe. So I know annie wants to say something as well. So I think for me anyway, annie might have a different view is that it's almost a totally different product, and so you know, volume wise, we're not going to displace, but what we provide is an alternative solution. So for farmers wanting to grow that and for people wanting to eat something that is more nutrient dense and that has contributed positively rather than negatively towards an ecosystem, then it's providing another option on the shelf, and that's the way, for now anyway, that I would see it kind of co-evolving expect those that potentially purchase um impeccable poultry, whatever it is in the future, uh, to be still purchasing um commercial chicken.
Speaker 3:So I I expect there will be. I hope there is some level of displacement. But I think what is really key to the project as well is this kind of journey of the citizen and the consumer or um, and being able to use poultry or chicken to tell the story of of food and get people to try and connect back to food. So I think we envisage you'll probably be selling whole birds and that that comes with um, with some kind of recipe, some kind of way of um of really connecting with what you're purchasing. So it's not sold, it's unlikely to go into a burger or anything like that. So I think, as Claire says, it's going to be a very different product and it's going to be trying to achieve a very different thing as well to commercially raised poultry.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. You keep saying commercially. I I would still hope that also, these, these chickens are going to be raised commercially, um, not not large scale, yeah, no, I think that's the. But everybody understands what you mean. It's just my, my pet peeve that I think this should be done commercially. Um, in in a way as well and just staying with you, like how positive if you know that they could. Like I understand from the margin perspective, it's interesting enough eggs, interesting to from a farmer perspective, to sell chickens because it's something everybody eats, or many people eat. You don't have to learn how to to cook a rabbit or a duck or something like that, which might be way more relevant actually for the land. How positive can chickens be for the land? Is it from a farming and farmer and soil perspective, with the picking, with their feces, of course? Is that an easy bit in terms of regeneration?
Speaker 2:So I think we don't know, we don't know the true answer. Nobody's measured it yet um, and that's what that's. What we want to do is to understand that and like what's the balance? So, you know, on an 80 acre farm, should we have 10 chickens? Should we have a thousand chickens? Um, you know, because there'll be a tipping point, um, of where, of where it sits, and that's one thing that we um, that's one thing. That's, yeah, what we really need to understand as part of um, as part of this process and another genetic side.
Speaker 1:It sounds really long-term and complex to figure out, okay, which dual purpose genetics are even out there which might work in our context, etc. And do you have, like, how would it even work? Let's say you, you get the funding, because that's what you're looking for, of course, partners, funding etc to to kick off impeccable poultry. Um, in terms of timeline, when should we expect or when, what are timelines looking like for for this kind of genetics research? And to to figure out something that that you can then safely but of course, with certain conditions but say, okay, we have at least, uh, an idea of a blueprint or an idea of of this genetics works in this context, so with at least with our neighbors, we can have a conversation or something like that. What would you? Is that a 10, 15, 20 year, two year? What kind of timelines are we? Are we talking here?
Speaker 3:I think it's also it's always going to be an evolution, isn't it? So there's a kind of an eye on continuous progress and making um, making that improvement and, as the world is, you're not going to put something out there that then isn't, is never going to change. So I think, in terms of the blueprint, we can, we can get to a point where we can be much more certain than we currently are um, and that will be hopefully two, two years or so um because chickens are relatively fast as well.
Speaker 1:It's not like a cow or on a ruminants where it might take years, like in terms of chicken.
Speaker 3:I'm imagining, um, it might be a faster cycle to to improve, to see, to select, to yeah, absolutely, and I think, I think there's also there are quite a few genetics out there, so that there's um, there's opportunity to bring how do you find them?
Speaker 1:do you go around, like in backyards, like how do you look for chicken?
Speaker 3:genetics well. So we've got quite a lot of contacts from um. In europe there's a, there's a company that are um evolving a dual purpose bird um, so we've got contacts from, from work over there and then, um, yes, again we've got quite a few contacts in china too that we're hoping to look at. I think there's obviously going to be issues trying to import, import genetics and such like, but, um, but there is, there are. I think it's about finding, finding them, and then they, they tend to emerge as well. So, um, again, through our contact that we've had, uh, the current, uh, dual purpose he's, he's an amazing um person and has been kind of tapped into the world of chicken genetics since he was a really young, young boy.
Speaker 1:So so they are, they're out there and, um, they're very keen as well quite often yeah, because how unique is this in terms of um real on-farm, uh deployment, like embedding of, of dual purpose, etc. Compared in the rest of the world? Like how? How should we rate this on the the uniqueness scale?
Speaker 3:I think the dual purpose. It's really unique in the uk, but it's not so unique globally. Definitely because the kind of backyard, small-scale-ish production for family groups within Asia is really commonplace. People will have chickens in order to feed their families. So it's unique within the kind of UK context definitely, but less unique globally. I guess the uniqueness comes from Impeccable in terms of trying to enable farmers to do that kind of within our current agricultural framework that we have. That we need to evolve. That's where the uniqueness comes. So how can we put, put more chickens onto more farms in a way that, as claire says, is really environmentally beneficial and, um, also good for the birds?
Speaker 1:yeah, because having 10 birds in your backyard compared to maybe a thousand on a farm is a fundamentally different like plus raising them commercially or raising them for margins, instead of of hoping to have. If you have seven eggs in the morning or five, it doesn't really matter in your backyard. But of course these numbers matter a lot in terms of when you start integrating them in in other people's farm also in yours, but in in other people's farm. And then on the feed side, what, what are you looking at? What do you think? What would you love to try? What are you? Um? Yeah, what? What is on your, your, your list, basically in terms of feed developments or feed uh alternatives or feed um research that you would love to to tackle first yeah, it's gonna go first um.
Speaker 2:So what we uh. One thing that's really interesting that strikes me already is just the, the volume of feed that the dual purpose birds that we've got on the ground at the moment are even eating. So they seem to be eating a lot less of the of the kind of the normal classic feed, um. So there's just some, some of those kind of um, those that for me, it's even just starting with that observation, but then annie's probably going to talk about more, some of the more interesting things that we might look at with feed. Well, we have done some experimenting with um. What we have done on the farm is we've experimented with sprouting grains, we've experimented with fermenting um then kittredge would be very happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, so we've, we've done that and again it's that um, and I think maybe, maybe most that do it, um, we do it at a level that works within a first. It works for us because we're dedicated to wanting to do it, but we haven't yet found like, oh, this works really well and it's really easy. Um, you know it's not, it doesn't come with with with ease almost. Um, and we can see the benefit in the birds when we do it. Um, but it's quite a lot of work. So there's, there's solutions that's still to be looked at around how to do that and the and the and the right balance of it, and how, how beneficial is it? So I think we don't.
Speaker 2:We know that those things do help, but do they help with the amount of cost and effort that there is at the moment? And some, uh, you know innovation is needed, I think, in how do you deliver? You know, how do you deliver fermented feed regularly to birds? Um, in a way, that's not a lot of work, um, because then it just won't happen, particularly when we're talking about integrating poultry as an enterprise onto another farm. That's one of the reasons that. Why isn't everybody doing it already is because the expertise doesn't exist. So we want to, you know, want to make that as kind of do that research why it's a research thing now, to figure out how to do that, to make it easy for others yeah, I think there's also.
Speaker 3:I think there's it's not just expertise, isn't it that that makes it that is a barrier to to it being across multiple farms. There's kind of economies of scales and things like that that we want to start to explore. So how can we um, I don't know bulk purchase grains for sprouting or such in a way that then makes it much more economically viable, um, for other farmers too? So so it's not just kind of the absolute feed that they're being fed, but but the kind of everything that surrounds that and how to get that to the birds in a way that's viable ultimately.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it sounds to think of biochar or something it sounds like every farmer should do that. You can probably Google and YouTube your way into a sort of recipe, but most are really good compost but most farmers won't because of a whole range of reasons, like it's not that easy to build a Johnson Sault compost or whatever compost system you're using. You could, but you need to spend the time and energy that you cannot spend elsewhere to do so, and I think I don't know sprouting grain sounds a bit in the similar area. You could do it yourself. But if somebody doesn't only deliver you the genetics or the chickens, but also if you figured out that it makes it's worth the effort and the money to use sprouting, and if somebody also sells you that feed directly or a really easy recipe or a really easy method to, or machine or whatever setup that that you can use, because, yeah, we just know it's not going to happen otherwise, because it's thing number 10 on your to-do list and we'll just not um, unless it's really magical for birds. But none of this is magical, it's all incremental um. And so where are you now in terms of we? We're recording this in the middle of 2024.
Speaker 1:What is the current status? You said we have some birds on the land. Would you describe the current status of Impeccable Poultry?
Speaker 3:I think we're at the pre-pilots almost. We're playing with the resources that we currently have and really wishing to kind of get it kind of really kick-started in terms of funding for for time and designing houses and doing it at a much, much kind of faster pace, I guess. So, yeah, we have a very small kind of chicken group, I guess at the moment to to try and explore um or start to kind of get to know some dual purpose genetics at the moment. But yeah, definitely at the the pre-pilot stage or pilot maybe and what do you think?
Speaker 1:investors? I think they're starting to become a bit of excitement around chickens again, but then a different kind of chicken and eggs, some from the health side of things, so for the diet side, some from the role it could play in farmer finance, etc. It feels also very early in that. We've seen a few companies. I think Vital Farms in the US, pasture Bird, which we interviewed, which I'll link below, tree Range, which we interviewed and invested in actually with our syndicate, are also exploring on a different scale, different angle, but definitely putting the chicken in many cases first and being very vocal about it, which I think we we need are very vocal about the issues of the current chick. We didn't really talk about that, but the current chicken industry go in google, I think, is the first thing. You go and be ready for the most horrible videos you will. You will see um. So I think we see more and more people waking up to that kind of like. It's a completely different product, like you said, claire um. But let's say we do this in uh, in a.
Speaker 1:I like to ask that question and the room is full of people that want to put money to work, their own money, of other people's money. What would you tell them? Of course, get in touch if you can grant or donate or you can partner. But from an investment point of view, what should investors know about the chicken industry now and the potential of Regen? What would be something you like to plant? What kind of seed would you like to plant in their mind if you could?
Speaker 2:That's a good question, I think it is just. I think chicken is one of those. It's really unknown about the multiple problems that it has. It's such an everyday feature in a British diet that we kind of assume that it's all good. Actually is inherent with problems and globally impacting problems as well, and globally impacting problems as well. Um, so I think it's firstly just kind of um understanding that anything that is contributing towards when we're supporting anything in that way of chicken is just being awake to what we're doing and it's okay to be working in that system. But, um, being being really awake is what's happening and that the, the nutrient density of that food is not so great. Totally lost my train of thought. Annie. Did you have anything to say about that? I've forgotten the question and everything.
Speaker 1:What should investors know?
Speaker 2:Oh, what should investors know? I think the other thing for investors or people thinking about chickens to know is just, maybe it it's very the chicken industry globally is quite centrally controlled, um, and and, and we include the genetics in that. So, um, people might talk about different oh, I've got highline or I've got loam and brown but ultimately two corporate companies own, um, all of the laying hen or majority of laying hen genetics globally, and another two that own all the broilers and so, and then they are connected to, or the same companies as the feed and then and and the the farms and everything. So, just a kind of. When we often think of a farm, we imagine a family farm as as it is, and it's all kind of independent. So even where people are might be independent, still very reliant on a centrally controlled system, and that is something that feels like in this more ever-changing world that we need more diversity, don't they say? You know? I don't know what the question was, but the answer was always diversity. So we don't have diversity in our chicken sheds, in our birds and in the companies that control our chicken system, and I think that's something to just it kind of goes under the radar.
Speaker 2:I don't think many people are aware of that and just having an awakening of that to then think, okay, I'm okay with that and that's going to carry on, or actually maybe I want to contribute, particularly as it's a product that so many people eat. It meets so many requirements, um, of nutritionally, of people. It can, when it's done well, um, and, like you say, it's quite a quick turnaround and things like that. It's it's as a food source, it's um, it's very adaptable and very good and um, but but yeah, maybe the way we're doing at the moment, I don't think most people realize, maybe the degradation that that's contributing to in human health, ecological health, and the birds are not having a great time. That's the center to all of this for Annie and I is that everybody often doesn't talk about the birds and not having a good life in those systems and we need to know that and try, if we can, to choose to do it differently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a great slide in your deck, or a great slide. The current state of chicken, which shares a number of headlines from the river Y, pollution coming from a chicken farm that's now being sued. Of course, poison poultry, the antibiotics used, which three major supermarkets in the UK still source. Antibiotic-treated chicken connected to salmonella. Deforestation in Brazil, bird flu detected in a person, like you can see, and these are just five, six headlines. You can see how far we pushed the system, which somehow makes a CAFO operation looks like I'm not saying paradise, but like these large pictures we know of these animals or the ruminants in the US, et cetera, other places, no grass, they're getting feed soy, et cetera. That makes this look like a holiday. Basically, like the chicken operations are on a whole different scale in terms of concentration, in terms of issues, in terms of death and in terms of animal welfare and human health as well. I mean, the fact that Berthelou could travel to a human should wake people up, but I don't think we see enough of those headlines. Somehow chicken is just not really talked about compared to some other, and then we didn't even talk about the slaughtering and the monopolies or oligopolies that you mentioned before. So it's safe to say. We need some diversity. Maybe that's a good message for stage there.
Speaker 1:And what would you do? We like to ask this question, to flip the question, and I'm very curious about both of your answers. Obviously, if you had a lot of money to put to work maybe a bit in grant funding, but actually quite a bit in investment money which could be extremely long term, so it doesn't have to be a 10-year, it could be long-term investments probably the chicken side, but you could, or poultry, but you could choose something else, like if both of you had to put a billion pound to work, pound sterling, what would you do? What would be the big buckets you focus on? I don't need exact amounts, but just okay, I would really focus on xyz, um and um, break, break it down.
Speaker 3:Let's say, if you had to, uh, from one day to another, put that amount of work money to work um, I think, I think regen is asking a lot of a lot from a lot of people, I think, um, in terms of the skill sets people need to uh, to develop, they need to be able to sell their produce, they need to be able to have multiple enterprises and and all of these things. So I think if I was to have, or put have investment to put somewhere, I put it towards kind of really practical solutions that can make farmers lives easier. So, be that kind of the formation of co-ops or buying groups or potentially having roaming managers that can help assist on enterprises across multiple farms, I think, trying to make people's lives less complex, because that's what we want to do as humans, right, but, but, but allow for that complexity in terms of what we're doing with our farming systems so how to enable farm managers or land stewards to complexify without giving them a burnout of 20 different enterprises and and roaming manager?
Speaker 1:very interesting answer. And it's like we asked them to complexify and then are are surprised when it doesn't work because it's, yeah, just too much for for a single. Our ideal image of a single family farm that does everything and sells on the farmer's market and does their own butchering or whatever. Um, yeah, that's probably not reality for most and maybe we shouldn't want that. But how do you combine? Because, yeah, there's a reason why we used to do this together and not just on a single farm. And what about you, claire?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's moving success away from a GDP style, you know, financial score and a life worth living for all of us. Um, which is difficult conversation, I guess, when we're talking in in investment terms.
Speaker 1:But well, you can get. You can get us an answer for the magic wand question, which I was going to ask after. So what would you do if you had a magic wand to change something overnight?
Speaker 2:that could be that one, but if you had money to work then, what would you, what would you do with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it would be in a similar way to Annie. It's in the people. So what we see is so it may be more investment. We see a lot of people want to invest in tech because it's a tangible thing, we can see it growing. But actually what we need is increased eco-literacy, increased ability to manage complexity on the land, a help in unpicking some of the cultural norms that have led us to believe that, you know, it's only good if it's controlled and it looks neat, and that those, those things are what we need support with. So it's kind of like equal focus on people and on technology.
Speaker 2:The fifth agricultural revolution is said to be a combination of one that will be technology and agroecology together. So we need equal investment going into the agroecology side, as we see going into the tech side, to help help some of these things yeah, to help help us, to help us. Ultimately, it's people, isn't it? That's what we need. We're the ones that will act the change. It's people, isn't it? That's what we need. We're the ones that will act the change. Um, and and most of us want to see a positive change we just don't always have the tools or the knowledge to do it, because society we've grown up in a mechanistic way and um, and we've been taught at agricultural college to do things in a certain way and it's quite hard to unpick that. So, um, that's what I would like to see. Yeah, investment in equal balance of agroecology and in technology. Um, because at the moment it feels like it's tipped more in the tech side of things definitely yeah, the the amount of money flowing to tech, uh is is quite staggering.
Speaker 1:Um, and then natural bridge to the magic wand, one which you partly already answered, but maybe you want to unpack a bit more. If you could change one thing overnight, and what would it be?
Speaker 2:yeah, um, a, a, a move from gdp being a measure of success, both at, you know, national, international level, but also down as just like financial success being being the only thing. That's success, you know, regarded as success because it's, it's leading to the extractive way in which we operate and actually, people, you know we, so maybe people are making money and everyone's unhappy. Um, so a health, health score. The other thing, if I could have two magic ones, would be to merge food, health, agriculture as one, uh, governmental unit. You know, while those two, while health and agriculture, sit separately, um, we have this kind of one, one thing doing one thing negatively, as if ever, or positive is affecting on the other negatively, um, and those two things can't be looked at in in in isolation.
Speaker 2:Um, so that would be my, yeah, my, my magic one to get some strategic change at that level, because most people don't want to live in this world that is so dominated by finance being the only measure, but somehow we're scared to speak up about that. Or there's challenges. When you set up a limited company, for example, you know, in your, in the articles of association, or it is, it is a requirement that you, you know you are always acting for the financial profitability of the business. Nothing's in there about the people or the ecology or the animals within that, and that's. You know that that sort of um you know egocentric through to ecocentric is is is the change that we need to see and what about you any, if you had the magic power to change one thing, and really one?
Speaker 1:I mean, most people end up saying one or two, um, but what would it be for you?
Speaker 3:I think.
Speaker 3:I think in a similar vein, I guess claire and I talk a lot um, it would be along the kind of true, true cost or true price paid.
Speaker 3:So, um, food, I guess, within the context of food, that you're not just paying, well, that all those costs aren't then externalized, so true, truly true cost accounting for whatever you're paying. So I guess we've having conversation earlier around the cost of impeccable chicken and actually the fact that you can buy chicken for don't know three pounds or something mad in a supermarket, that that shouldn't even be possible, so that people don't have those options, and, um, and yeah, and that that cost shouldn't be externalized to to the kind of soy production and rainforests and all of the things outside of what you're um, uh, yeah, what you're actually buying. But obviously then I guess, linking nicely into Claire's one, it does need to link into the kind of affordability and people need to be able to eat and it shouldn't just be for the people that can afford more expensive protein sources. But, yeah, a general world change. I think that's what I would say. My magic wand, your magic wand.
Speaker 1:yeah, a general world change, I think that's what I would say, my magic one. And and to wrap it up in terms of chicken, when you talk to people, what's the the one thing you would like them to know? What's the biggest surprise around chickens that people, even in the region space, don't really normally know? Like when you realize like, okay, this is something that, um, people should really know or normally don't realize when it comes to comes to chickens, what, what comes comes to mind in terms of stories, examples, etc.
Speaker 3:From working so much with with poultry both of you I mean at the most basic level, that there is two different types of chicken that lay eggs and the ones that you eat. That I think that just highlights the disconnect between people and food. So yeah, that's a slightly mad one. I think the amount of mortality associated within meat production, like we account for when placing birds um at large numbers, they account for that mortality to happen. So they're expecting three, four, five percent of those birds to die. So I think I think really kind of back to our kind of starting point of welfare. I think the welfare issues associated um with, particularly with, well, both meat and egg production um are really quite surprising to people when you talk to them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, basically, you're planning in trying to remove them as well, sometimes, and not always, managing to lose up to 5% of more birds, which is shocking, because that means that the other 95 are not doing so well either. If 5% is calculated to lose it, that's okay, or three or four, it doesn't make a big difference, honestly. And what about you, claire? What is your chicken go-to chicken story for shocking or surprising or delighting people?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think maybe the thing that's coming up as you ask the question that it's not something we've mentioned but would be often um in the debate about should we eat meat, shouldn't we eat meat good for the environment, bad for the environment is is that, oh, chicken's good because when we look at it through some carbon lenses it can look better and and often feed in, feed out, yeah yeah, exactly, and and and.
Speaker 2:So that there. So maybe the efficiency of feed consumed is great, but, um, all of the other, the nutrient density of the food, the life that the animals have had, um, they, you know they're not meant to waddle very slowly from one point to another before sitting down again. You know they're actually meant to be out and running around, um, and then, when they and when they are sitting down, you know they're in pain. So, um, I think there's quite a lot of unknowns about about it. But the one thing would be this uh, kind of like opening our eyes up to the narrative that chicken is better for the environment because of feed efficiency, when actually there is. When you look at the whole spectrum of different impacts and his point about the true cost, if we included the true cost to our health, to the animal's health and to our environment, then chicken isn't a pretty picture.
Speaker 1:I think it's a good way, or good moment to wrap up and I want to thank you first of all so much for the work you do and coming on here in an early phase to share. I think it's a very important moment to put a spotlight on it as well, even though you're just not meaning just but air quotes. But you're getting started with Impeccable Poultry, of course, building upon so much of the work you've done before, and I really look forward to following it over time and see what role chicken can play. Maybe the conclusion is it can't and it will be geese or in some other form. But let's imagine if there is a role, and how do you integrate more complexity without giving farmers burnout? I think is a good starting point and a good question to ask. And yeah, what's the counter narrative to the industrialized chicken, which is a sentence I really like from from your deck. So thank you so much for coming on here and to share about it and absolutely keep us posted okay thanks very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. For the show notes and links we discussed in this episode, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom. Forward slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend or give us a rating on Apple Podcasts? That really helps. Thanks again and see you next time.
