growing on the family farm in rural Herefordshire, Richard Corbett’s fondest memories are tinkering in his father’s workshop. “I always thought I would be a farmer,” says the 55-year-old. “But if I’m being honest, when I was a teenager I preferred to play with machines.”

Today, Corbett’s passion for engineering is channeled into the maintenance of his beloved road bike, and the family farm is a multi-million pound business. The vast majority of this annual turnover comes from raising chickens.

With eight locations in the three neighboring counties of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Powys, Corbett has been at the center of Britain’s poultry boom – and has hit the eye of its storm.

UK produced 1.7 million tonnes of chicken meat in 2020, up 28% from the previous decade. Meanwhile, the retail price of chicken has fallen by almost a quarter since 2014, meaning the average supermarket bird costs less than a pint of beer.

Of the 1.1 billion broilers slaughtered each year in Britain, around 25% are raised in Herefordshire and Shropshire, according to a Doctoral study by Cardiff University researcher Alison Caffyn.

Alarmed by the constant stream of controversy over chicken coop planning in her home county of Shropshire, Caffyn spent four years unraveling the explosive growth of the industry in this corner of Britain.

“I think people are nervous about criticizing agriculture,” she says, explaining the scarcity of knowledge about large-scale poultry units.

“A phrase came back to me several times in my research: ‘Well, we all have our feet in the water around farmers, don’t we?’ I think this is one of the cultural factors that explain why there has been little resistance to the development of intensive agriculture.

In the Powys, the density of poultry farms has reached a level unmatched in Europe, according to the Campaign to protect rural Wales.

Next door in Herefordshire and Shropshire, poultry units have nearly doubled in size and more than tripled in number to reach 1,150 – home to 38 million birds – in the space of two decades, building on the rich tradition of raising chickens in the county.

Former Tory MP Corbett’s late grandfather Uvedale Corbett, was a founding member of Hereford’s Sun Valley Agricultural Cooperative, established in 1960 to pack chickens for Marks & Spencer.

In Shropshire, John Percy Wood had been selling poultry as early as 1830. His sons developed the business under the brand name Chukie Chicken. By the 1970s it was one of the largest in the UK, handling 3 million birds at a time.

But the takeover of Sun Valley by US conglomerate Cargill in 1980 cemented the region’s future as Britain’s poultry capital.

“People have been talking about how Cargill went from a group of local poultry farmers working together to ‘something else,’ says Caffyn. “It shifted gears and became a different type of business.”

Cargill has invested £ 35million in the Hereford site, announcing in 2008 that it was actively seeking poultry producers.

A decade later, she partnered with Faccenda to create Avara Foods. After spending an additional £ 6.5million for Hereford in 2019, Avara became the third largest poultry processor in the UK, supplying Asda, Nando’s, Lidl and Tesco, and processing 4.5million poultry through week at three sites.

Avara spokesperson Thomas O’Neil said: “There are clear welfare benefits to using farms that are within a reasonable travel time to the processing plant, but it should also be noted that although we have key operations in Hereford, all of these farms are part of our supply chains.

The growth of Cargill and, more recently, Avara has helped catalyze farm diversification and the shift from more traditional mixed farming to poultry farming.

While Corbett also produces cider apples for Bulmers and black currants for Ribena, he points to a decline in the profitability of raising other animals as the reason for the attractiveness of poultry.

“Before, all farms were mixed farms, but nowadays you have no choice but to specialize because the margins are so low,” he says. “Years ago we had pigs, but the reality is they just aren’t profitable. Ditto with sheep.

Under contract exclusively with Avara, he raises laying hens, which in turn hatch broiler chicks and then reared on neighboring farms for the same business.

“Under contract, farmers know pretty much exactly what they’re getting paid and when,” he says. “It takes away the uncertainty.”

Another farmer, desperate to branch out and seeking permission to build a broiler unit in the Powys, says there is “no money” in sheep and cattle. A double whammy of Brexit uncertainty over farm subsidies and trade deals added to their woes.

“No one eats red meat,” they say, nervous about being named. Their older children get by with “pocket money”, they add.

The poultry boom in the region has fueled controversy, with activists dismayed at the apparent ease with which the new sheds are approved.

Cllr Andy Boddington has been on the South Shropshire Planning Committee for seven years.

He admits to feeling crippled by the lack of political direction on intensive poultry units in the local county plan or as part of the government’s national planning policy.

“It’s really frustrating that we don’t have the tools in our planning toolbox to master applications,” he says.

“I think there’s a culture in the planning department that says, ‘Oh that’s another chicken coop – let’s approve it.’ We no longer have a planning machine, we have a permit system. It is not at all about strategic planning.

Yet rural planning consultant Ian Pick says it’s harder than ever to get approval for a new project – nine out of ten fail in the pre-planning phase.

‘The sheer cost of the process means we don’t even apply unless we are 99.9% certain they will pass,’ he says, pointing to the average £ 50,000- £ 60,000 spending on an application. planning and reporting for four chicken coop site.

In north Herefordshire, a moratorium on planning has been in place since October 2019 after Natural England discovered phosphate levels in the River Lugg were above acceptable limits.

In Knighton, Powys, activists who opposed a poultry unit of 111,000 birds had their building permits revoked under judicial review in January. However, the farm – Llanshay – has since handed in his plans with new manure management proposals and the inclusion of ammonia scrubbers.

“They plan to take the manure to an anaerobic digester in Shropshire,” says Camilla Saunders of Sustainable Food Knighton. “Basically they want to shovel their shit over the border while industrializing the countryside to make food.”

Back in Shobdon, Herefordshire, Corbett admits the region is now “quite saturated”.

Avara is investing funds in its Brackley, Northamptonshire site with £ 11million announced for new packing hall equipment and new staff facilities. The region is emerging as a new front for anti-poultry activists.

But at the end of the day, it will be the supermarket buyer – “the most important person in our supply chain”, according to Corbett – who will set the industry’s future course.

“If people don’t buy it, we don’t produce it,” he says, before pointing out the irony that wellness poultry farming, which means lower storage densities and more floor space, can only mean bigger or bigger sheds – and potentially making low-income families pay for a source of protein.

Jonty Hay, manager of Hay Farms – one of the UK’s largest poultry producers – perhaps best exemplified this consumer power in his speech to the Pig and Poultry Fair online forum last month.

“Will we be eating meat in 20 years? he thought. “I don’t know. It will be interesting. But what we have to do is adapt and evolve with the consumer.

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