Episode 2 The Chicken People

In the UK each and every day, we eat more than two million chickens.

One in three comes from a single company in Northern Ireland.

Good afternoon, Moy Park.

That's nearly 10,000 tonnes a week

of fillets, nuggets, drumsticks and Kievs.

These lines are running about 18,000 birds per hour.

From farm to fork, it's a business worth billions.

This line I like to see full.

If this is full, we're making some money, so we are.

This massive operation takes a small army of farmers,

factory workers, technicians, and tasters.

-The sauce is a bit thin, isn't it?

-Yes.

-Some more work to do but...

-Are you happy?

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Meet the chicken people!

All across Northern Ireland, more than 600 farmers work

seven days a week to supply millions of chickens to Moy Park.

Organic or free-range, broiler or breeder, these farmers are private

contractors, separate from but very much a part of the Moy Park family.

Without our farmers, we don't have a business sense,

so there's a very strong interdependency there.

They walk into their chicken houses,

they know the mood of the chicken by how they're drinking the water.

They know the mood of the chicken by how they are eating the feed.

So they have a real sense and an empathy with the chicken.

And that to me is very important, that they really understand

and get chicken, because if they're looking after the chicken,

then the chicken will look after them and look after Moy Park.

At the Downard family's farm,

it's time for the chickens' weekly weigh-in.

And Stephen has developed his own particular

technique for rounding them up.

Some people describe farming as a disease. And it's in my blood.

I was born into it.

Probably don't know anything else.

But for Stephen, this is all something of a departure.

He only made the move to chicken farming a couple of months ago.

This enterprise particularly attracted us

because of the fact that the workload could be

fitted in around our children and our family life.

-What do you want? A ponytail or a bun?

-Ponytail.

-Ponytail.

With the arrival of baby Charlie,

Carol now has four young mouths to feed.

And plenty to keep her busy before setting off on the school run.

Well done, Charlie.

Right, let's go. Go, go, go. Right, come on.

Yes. Put the stuff in the boot.

Now, come on. This way, this way.

Easy, now. Easy. Easy!

But here's the twist.

Come 8.30, Stephen beats a hasty retreat.

Me now - shower, washed, change of clothes, off to work, you know.

We're off to job number two.

As he heads off to his day job, it's Carol who dons the wellies,

going straight from school run to chicken run.

My husband first started talking about it, I wasn't sure,

and thought that it was maybe just a phase and it would maybe pass.

Then I found out I was pregnant with Charlie.

And realised that it probably would be a better life,

that I wouldn't have to be going out to work.

Charlie was only born on 3rd April

and our first crop of birds came in the 6th June.

So I had nine weeks' maternity, whereas normally,

I'd have nine months!

Suddenly finding yourself in sole charge of 50,000 chickens is

a pretty daunting prospect. Luckily, technology can lend a hand.

A modern broiler house is more than just a big shed.

It moderates and regulates every aspect of the birds' environment,

from the electrically operated shutters that control

the hours of daylight, to the triple filtered water supply -

cleaner than the tap water we drink at home.

And of course, all of this is done automatically.

This is the control panel.

There's one of these for each house.

It records everything from the temperature to the humidity

and to the body weights, to the water consumption.

Everything.

It would be kind of handy if I could have the family computerised,

just like the farming is!

It would be...

..very handy!

This is only the Downards' third crop of birds.

For Carol, who gave up her

office job to work on the farm, it's been a steep learning curve.

We started our first crop to the start of June,

which we found difficult enough.

The first day, they delivered 28,250 chickens for each house.

So we were extremely scared that we were now responsible for all

these chicks to survive.

We were probably in the houses a lot more than what

we should have been, because we just had this fear that they were

all going to be lying dead if we didn't keep checking on them!

I always wanted to work with animals. My dream job

would have been to work as a veterinary nurse,

but I didn't want to do the studying.

But I never, ever would have thought it would have been chickens,

cos I never really particularly liked chickens, if I'm honest!

Happily for Moy Park, though, a lot of people really do like chicken.

The Craigavon factory produces an estimated

120,000 packs of food every hour.

But no new product goes into mass production

without passing through a series of tests and trials.

This is a big day for the new product development team.

Today, we're doing the first run of a new design of formed

chicken product with a sauce, so we've had a trial mould made up

and now we're doing the first-of-line to see how it works.

The new recipe is chicken, filled with garlic and herb sauce

and coated in a crispy breadcrumb.

If that sounds suspiciously like a chicken Kiev,

the team is also testing a piri piri tomato version.

Get them like that.

Just a little bit longer.

Yeah, that will fill that hole.

The shape of the fillet is Peter's design

and he's very protective of his creation.

Can you leave... No-one touch these, OK. Just me and Ada.

It's little wonder that Peter is feeling the pressure.

If this project proves as successful as a chicken Kiev,

or a southern fried fillet, it could be worth millions to Moy Park.

A good result is if the product works as we expected to.

A bad result is it doesn't work at all.

Anything in between would be good.

The team is keen to emphasise that Peter's design is not,

I repeat not, a Kiev.

In fact, they are still struggling with what to call it.

We've called it chicken melts, we've called it a filled steak.

It's just quite difficult, really,

to put a name on something like this that is quite new.

I mean, we're producing on the line that we produce our Kievs,

you know, but it's not a Kiev.

It's just chicken filled with sauce,

so any ideas for a name would be good.

Something exotic? Chicken Craigavon? Saucy breasts?

In 2014, Moy Park announced that it was expanding its operation,

adding at least 250 new poultry houses in Northern Ireland.

How is it all going on, anyway?

Oh, it seems to be going all right, like.

Colm Kelly is building two of them.

And since he is a newcomer to poultry farming, Moy Park has sent

someone along to make sure everything is going according to plan.

I'm Stephen and I'm the Assistant Agri Projects Manager in Moy Park.

It's a nice job. Basically, it's anything to do with

house building, renovations, bringing in new equipment,

just helping the farmers through that process.

As we've already seen, today's chicken houses

are like the seven-star hotels of the poultry world.

But all that luxury comes at a price.

Even Colm's simpler and less expensive free-range sheds

will set him back a cool half a million pounds.

Not exactly chicken feed for a start-up!

-What is this?

-Eh?

It's hardly even a oak frame, is it?

How long has he been here? Is this his first day?

No, I wasn't...

I've had very little experience with poultry at all and that's another reason we went with Moy Park,

because I know they have a good advisory staff there.

If you're making the sort of investment that's been made,

you really need a bit of advice

to keep you going at the start anyway, so you do.

It's very much we work with them in partnership and we would help them

to identify sources of funding.

We work with them to help to get the planning permission

through for any new houses.

Many farmers have been working with us for over ten, 15,

20 years, so it very much is a partnership.

We have Moy Park staff who work with our farmers to help them

to understand how to really raise the chicken.

Chickens don't raise themselves.

Most people would probably assume that chicken farming is

a fairly hazard-free occupation.

But breeding farmers like Kevin Scullion tell a very different story.

One that reveals the chickens' little-known dark side.

A person says to me one day,

"You would be down at that hen house -

"What if you took something there, or fell, or took ill?

"What would you do? Who would know where you are?"

Cos if you were laying in the middle of all those hens,

God knows what could happen. They could peck at you or something.

It's an environment there, if they got the better of you,

I would say you'd have to worry, but it's never happened to us,

like. But you're in their territory.

To illustrate this vicious streak, Kevin recalls a traumatic

episode from his son Connor's childhood.

When Connor was about two or three, I let him watch me

go around the hen houses but I heard this commotion going on behind me.

Connor had followed me into the henhouse

and then the roosters attacked him.

SCREECHING

The roosters are the most vicious.

There's birds that would take the ankles clean off you.

You can feel them.

If you're walking through the henhouse, you can feel them

patter on the ground.

You know there's somebody coming at you. You can feel it.

You just turn around, and there he is, coming in mid air,

and he's sticking his spurs in you, and the wings is flapping.

He'll put you on your knees.

Just take it nice and slow.

There was one day, I was walking through the henhouse

and there's these two roosters came at me from behind.

And you know the way when you hit someone in the back

of their knees and take the legs of you, you'd fall to the ground.

They put me to the ground.

You have to get up, you have to beat them off you.

You just have to slap them off and push them out of your route, like, you know.

Cos if you don't, they'll just walk over you.

Please note, no farmers were harmed in the making of this film.

The reason why Kevin and his family risk life and limb every single day

is to send these fragile eggs on their way to the hatchery.

Every single one of these six million eggs has the potential

to become a fully grown chicken destined for the dinner table.

To make sure that as many as possible complete the journey in one piece,

Moy Park uses a nifty little piece of technology

called the crackless egg.

This is our crackless egg,

which we use to monitor impacts through our egg collection systems.

It's basically an egg-shaped object

which is packed full of sensors

and electronics.

As I put the egg on the system and follow it through,

we can watch it on the graph where the points of impact are.

Ian!

The first impact registered - it's just over 12 and a half.

Which is quite OK, acceptable.

Anything above 30, that will cause damage to the egg.

The slightest impact to an egg can cause a hairline crack,

totally invisible to the naked eye.

Hairline cracks on eggs in the hatchery, the egg will

basically dry out as it incubates and we won't get chicks out of it.

Before long, the patented crackless egg

proves its worth by identifying possible trouble spots.

OK, we've had a number of impacts.

We have this one point here, which is just as the egg comes in there.

-Another egg banged into it.

-Yeah.

And that could possibly create damage to the egg.

It's very useful for identifying any places where damage has been

caused or hairline cracks.

We are paid by chick, not per egg, so if an egg doesn't hatch, it's worth nothing to us.

We need chicks.

A typical flock of breeding birds will lay about five million

hatching eggs during its working life.

Scaled up across the entire Moy Park operation,

that's around eight billion potential chickens a week.

So even the tiniest improvement could make a massive difference.

It's probably close to £1 million we can save

if we can reduce the damage by just 1%.

I guess the device really is all it's cracked up to be!

Back at the Downards' house, with the chickens taken care of,

Carol turns her attention back to her own brood.

Up to school for the first pick-up.

Ellie and Molly get out at 2.15, and Lizzie doesn't get out to 3.15.

With the chickens, if I have to go to something in school,

or the girls forget something, which happens quite often,

I can leave whatever I'm doing and run and do those things

and the chickens don't mind at all if you're half an hour late.

I'd say Charlie wouldn't be too chuffed about it, though.

Right, let's go.

Aren't you going to talk to Charlie?

CHARLIE MUMBLES

You're full of talk now, Charlie!

Yeah.

Yeah, get it out of you, Charlie.

I didn't mind working in an office, whenever I did, but now that

I've had a change, I realise now, you know, I love the flexibility.

I love, you know, I do actually like working with animals.

I like the fact that there's no phones to answer,

no customers to deal with.

It's fairly stress-free and hassle-free, really -

provided there's nothing wrong with the birds,

they're the same every day, really.

To a busy mum of four, spending a few hours with the chickens

comes as a welcome oasis of calm.

Sometimes you do feel like your life does revolve around chickens

and children but I enjoy the fact that I have two hours with

no talking, no listening, just walking through birds

and nobody looking at me to take them to the

toilet or feed them all, you know - it sounds sad,

but it is probably two hours of stress-free in the day.

In fact, Carol reckons that in this male-dominated industry,

the sisters should be doing it for themselves.

M'hm!

I would say women are more discouraged, because of the heavy

work and the smell and the fact that you are in that environment.

A lot of the people in from Moy Park would say women can actually

do it better, because women are more attentive to cleaning up after,

keeping the place clean and tidy and because even with working with

children, you usually know children and animals are quite alike.

You know, you usually know when they're sick.

But at the start of the day, I think most people do think,

"Wow! You work with chickens - really?"

So I think it is probably more seen as a man's job.

But I'll try and prove them wrong!

Back in Craigavon, it's the moment of truth for Peter's new chicken Kiev.

I mean...product.

I'm no expert, but that looks a bit runny.

-The sauce is a bit thin, isn't it?

-Yeah. Could be thicker.

It could, couldn't it? The sauce, we think it's a little bit runny but as I said, it's early days yet.

But those are the learnings we get from trials.

Garlic and herb sauce - nul points.

It's down to the piri piri to spice things up a bit.

Uh-uh.

We tasted the sauce yesterday, on its own without any chicken.

It's better with the chicken, though I feel it lacks taste.

-Yeah.

-Yeah. Did you reduce the heat in it?

No. It's very tomatoey.

Do you think it is too tomatoey?

It is, very tomatoey.

So we're agreed, it's tomatoey, then.

But just don't take their word for it, Peter. Have a go yourself.

I don't like that version at all.

-Which version is that?

-5A, the latest one.

-Do you think the tomato...

-It is quite tomatoey, yeah.

-It is. I think more tomatoey...

-I like the vinegar. I like that...

-Sharpness?

-Yeah, sharpness you get from it.

There's a few tweaks we need to do, obviously,

but it's the first time we've run the product,

apart from handmade kitchen samples, so as a first trial,

it's been very successful.

-Some more work to do, but...

-Are you happy?

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-After all the effort you put in...

-Yeah.

-..finalising our first product of the factory.

-Yeah. Very happy. No, that's good.

-And the factory love it!

-I can come back. I'm safe to come back!

-You can come back any time!

The recipe for the new product was originally cooked up

here by Moy Park's team of executive chefs.

This week, with the Balmoral show fast approaching,

the chefs have been asked to come up with a special menu for the occasion.

This is obviously for the Balmoral Show, so we're doing two dishes.

We're doing breakfast and then moving on to our lunch and this is going to form part of the lunch,

which we're serving in a little picnic basket.

It's promotional, it's an opportunity for us as the chefs in the business

to sort of showcase that we have the skills to really push forward

some innovative ideas.

It looks like a cherry tomato

but it tastes of pate with a blood orange jelly.

Here's some that we made earlier.

Then you just sort of smash that down onto the pate.

I suppose "don't eat the stalk" would be the advice.

I'm sure that will happen tomorrow, actually. We'll get a few people spitting stalks out this year!

For the breakfast portion of the menu,

Martin is precooking poached eggs.

300 of them.

Get them chilled in ice water as quickly as possible.

Just to set the yolks, to make sure they don't overcook.

Ideally, if we were doing it in a restaurant,

we wouldn't do this stage.

You'd poach your egg and then serve for the numbers involved.

At a large show, it's completely impractical.

Martin is usually based at Moy Park's Grantham site in Lincolnshire,

but he has been specially POACHED for the occasion.

I get brought over for this kind of thing just because of how...

-You're the eye candy.

-I'm the eye candy, yeah.

And with Aaron's lunchbox looking good enough to eat...

-That be enough?

-Yeah. Looks great.

..it's time to pack up and go.

See how fiddly these are? Imagine doing 300 of them!

One farm in the Moy Park group is quite unlike any other.

The chickens inside this house aren't destined for the dinner table -

instead, they're the subject of scientific research.

What we do here is we test a whole series of hypotheses

around growing chicken. Oh, heavens. These things are...

-LAUGHING:

-If you swing your leg the other way...

First crop of birds came through in November last year.

And the purpose of the farm was for us to come up with a way

that we could write scientific projects,

look at different types of feed and look a different types of birds

and growing systems, but not really be challenged with the commercial

and the operational challenges of daily running the business.

The 36 pens in this special facility hold nearly 20,000 birds.

But for the current set of tests,

they have basically been divided into two groups.

At the moment, what we're looking at is

the difference in components of the diet.

So we will have half the house set up as what we would term

a control, which is what the broader farming group would use.

And we have half the house set up with a potentially different diet.

-These things look incredibly good for 11 days.

-Yeah.

They all look very consistent.

Looking for even the slightest changes in the birds' development,

these guys have to really know their onions. Well, chickens.

I thought they were a wee bit slow the first few days,

-but from day four or five, they've really taken off.

-They've taken off.

-Yeah.

The facility is designed to test a whole range of new ideas,

from modifications in diet and water, improvements in the birds'

welfare, even new breeds of the chickens themselves.

The overall purpose of the house is to come up with the best way

to produce chickens. It's not too dusty at all, is it?

No, it's perfect.

In a business with close to 40 million chickens

on the ground at any one time, tiny changes make a massive difference.

We look at it from a statistical point of view

and then what we do is roll it out across our farming group.

It is a blend of technology and science, genetics.

It is all about the detail.

It's all about having empathy with the chicken or the chick,

or with the egg.

And the more that we can understand the process that they go through

and how we can tweak, fine-tune and measure and improve, it is

a constant process of really improving.

So because of the volume and scale, small changes have a big impact

on the efficiency and effectiveness of our business.

The house was built so that we could check out the best way to do

things and capture all of the data to help us

validate what's the best thing to do and what's not so good to do.

Kingsley, I notice there's a difference in water consumption

across three and four, versus five and six.

What do you think is causing that?

You didn't think I knew what was going on, did you?

Kingsley's farm might be at the cutting edge of agricultural

technology, but his father Desmond remembers a simpler time,

when chicken houses were called arks and predators entered at their peril.

The time we had the arks, the farmer used to go around the arks

every night and close the chickens in.

The next morning, he came out

and there was a badger that had crawled in through a hole

in the side of the ark.

It ate so many chickens and was so fat, it couldn't get

back out through the ark hole again, so that was his last supper.

-Why, what happened?

-The farmer put an end to him with a .22.

OK...

It's graduation day at Greenmount Agricultural College.

And among this year's crop of successful students is Carol,

with husband Steven along to EGG her on.

One year into her new career,

Carol has passed her level three diploma in Poultry.

I have been very proud, of course. She took it on, she took to it well.

A few nervous days and nights at the start,

but I think today is a day when we'll have a bit of fun

and enjoy some of the hard work she put in over the last 12 months.

Now look to the level three work-based diploma in Poultry.

Ryan Davidson, Veronica Dickey, Carol Downard.

APPLAUSE

I wouldn't consider myself to be brainy at all.

I'm the one with the common sense. No, I've never graduated before.

This is the first time for me.

Never thought it would have been in any form of agriculture, but...

Sure. Life has changed dramatically for me.

I never thought I'd make a farmer of her and Carol would be

the one who would tell you she never thought she would be a farmer.

You know, while she has fallen into the trap, she's making sure

our three-year-old doesn't fall into the same one.

Never marry a farmer!

Next time on The Chicken People...

We've no customers.

I'm just going to have to close the restaurant down.

Ladies, can you not go out and drum up some trade there?

There's meant to be some passers-by.

It certainly is a lovely, free way of life, isn't it?

-Don't paint it too good.

-Oh, no. It's very hard.

I better go before he kills me!