Boost for Farm Shop Chicken Sales?

In the view of one farm shop owner, independent retailers of farm-raised chicken might take heart from these findings as it highlights the problems inherent in mass-scale chicken production, while offering farm shop owners the chance to flag up the advantages of buying home-bred fowls over those sold in supermarkets.

“Our chickens come out in the morning and run around, pecking at the bugs and worms of bits of grass that they find. They have free range of the farm and can go wherever they like. All this makes them fitter and stronger and produces better meat,” said Nicky Dorward of Limes Farm. This, she said, is hugely different from the world of large scale chicken farming. “Our chickens have a natural life. There is no mass feeding or risk of contamination from foods getting muddled up.” The processes employed in mass feeding can lead to contamination. “Often, the chickens are being fed using automatic feeders and if these may not have been cleaned properly,” she said. “There is so much more of a process in feeding a huge number of chickens than you will find on a farm like ours. Our process involves opening the hutch in the morning and getting the corn bucket. The more you scale-up anything, the more risk you have of something going wrong.”   

“I think it is a bit iffy to make claims for food safety, but I think what you can say is that if you are buying a chicken from a farm shop that has been reared in a farm environment free range, you are going to have a chicken with a richer,s more developed flavour,” she said. 

This is not the first time that questions have been asked about the large scale production of chickens or that independent retailers have been advised to promote the natural credentials of their chicken.  As a former food industry work, Nicky Dorward is familiar with the practise of adding water to mass-produced chicken meat. “They sometimes inject the meat with a brine solution and this makes the end product a lot heavier. They vacuum tumble the product to get the water into the meat. The customer is then paying for a lot of water. I don’t think they can legally do this on the chicken breasts you can buy, but they definitely add brine solution to processed products.”