Here you are.
Last Friday night, Kaz and I stayed B&B in a very beautiful farmhouse with some extremely friendly and pleasant hosts. This was prior to us going to the Cider festival at Ralphs Cider in New Radnor.
Heres a picture of the farmhouse.
and some of the wonderful views.
John the farmer says that he's retired but he hasn't really
On the Friday evening, infront of a roaring log stove, the conversation got around to one of my favourite subjects, that of chickens. He then let it slip that the farm boasted a free range flock of commercial blue egg laying chickens. He said that the enterprise was only on a small scale and that they only had four thousand birds. :shock:
Yesterday morning, he very kindly gave us a guided tour of the facility. It was a new enterprise for the farm and he reckoned that it represented an investment of around £80,000. It was well worth taking the pleasant stroll to have a look. Here's the first view that we had.
and a few of the chickens out in the fresh air. They were all the same strain of blue egg laying hybrids but they were very varied in colour.
The hens had the use of several acres of field.
They were well protected by a mains electric fence which also had a stand by generator permanently at the ready.
Now we were taken into what to all intents and purposes was a massive poly tunnel like structure. It had been manufactured in Bulgaria and was reconstructed over here in the space of three weeks by some Brits living in Bulgaria. Its built in such a way that it can be jacked up for cleaning and then towed to fresh ground.
There was absolutely loads of the access and egress points for the birds but we were suprised that at 9.30 am in the morning, the larger proportion of the birds had chose to stay indoors. John explained that at sometimes of the day, far more would be outside but that it seemed to go in phases.
Human intervention was kept to a minimum wherever possible and the ample nesting areas had a conveyor belt system that carried the eggs to here where they were graded and stacked on trays.
Due to the lighting conditions and possibly the camera, the eggs don't look particularly blue, but I can assure you that they are. A lorry comes to the unit twice a week to take the eggs away.
Just about everything is automated in this state of the art system. Its all push button.
Its not quite as we keep ours but the chickens were well looked after and seemed perfectly at ease and happy.
IMO, it was the farmer who was under far more stress than the birds . He told me that the eggs were sold to the end user at £4.00 a dozen and that the credit crunch was affecting sales with people thinking twice about purchasing them. The four thousand chickens were consuming approximately three and half tons of feed per week at £230 pounds per ton. In the light of the investment that he'd only recently paid out for the unit and the precarious situation of the current market, it wouldn't be a committment that I'd want to have.
I thoroughly enjoyed the tour and I saw it as an absolutely massive contrast to the battery system. I couldn't see how in anyway the conditions for the birds could be improved on.
Next June, all the birds will be whisked away to be made into soup, the place will be cleaned and disinfected ready for the next batch. lets hope that my host still has a market to cater for.
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August 22, 2008, 19:44