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Standing in Cherry Tree Farm in Norfolk, I watch 25 pigs in an indoor pen. The subsequent time I come throughout them, they might be bacon or pork within the Tesco Most interesting vary, which the farm provides. They’re being fed to a closing weight of about 100 kilos earlier than slaughter, snuffling round, and doing what pigs do.
There’s a faint, acrid scent from 6,400 animals held in pens in seven sheds, whose ammonia-infused waste is mucked out every day. It isn’t new: this has been a pig farm because the Nineteen Sixties, though the size is bigger and environmental guidelines are stricter. “The farm stank far worse than this earlier than,” remarks Charles Bowes, the most recent of the household to run the farm.
However Cherry Tree and different intensive pig and hen farms owned by Cranswick, the FTSE 250 meals producer, are actually struggling in opposition to opposition from locals and animal welfare and environmental campaigners. Bowes faces common complaints from one close by resident specifically, though the Atmosphere Company has “solely confirmed sturdy odours on just a few events”.
This culminated in April when Cranswick’s plan to construct a “megafarm” to boost 14,000 pigs and 714,000 chickens at a time at an present pig farm close to two Norfolk villages was rejected by the borough council. It drew 1000’s of objections, together with from Terry Jermy, Labour MP for West Norfolk, who declared it was “not the form of farming this nation needs or wants.”
Cranswick’s fame was additional broken final week by the revelation within the Mail on Sunday of cruelty, together with killing piglets with blunt pressure, at one in every of its 400 pig farms. Its shares fell by 9 per cent as supermarkets suspended provides from the Lincolnshire farm, which had been licensed by the Pink Tractor “farmed with care” scheme. Cranswick describes the mistreatment as “wholly unacceptable.”
That contrasts with Cranswick’s development in recent times, with its share worth rising by 74 per cent since Could 2023 to a market capitalisation of £3bn. It was based in 1975 to make pig feed however has steadily expanded, coming into hen farming in 2016. Its shares recovered on Tuesday to a document excessive because it introduced a 14.6 per cent rise in pre-tax earnings for the 12 months to March.
Just like the odour at Cherry Tree Farm, an air of unreality hangs over the anti-Cranswick marketing campaign. The cruelty in Lincolnshire was reprehensible and the corporate should show it was remoted. But it surely usually conforms to supermarket-monitored welfare and environmental requirements and its practices are akin to many farms.
Take one Cranswick hen farm I visited, the place 33,000 eggs per shed are laid out on straw to hatch. The fast-growing chickens that emerge spend their temporary lives in sheds, pecking at bales for as much as 38 days earlier than being slaughtered. Almost 300,000 chickens are raised at a time at a close-by Cranswick farm with eight sheds.
There aren’t any cages and welfare requirements have tightened. Cranswick simply elevated the area per hen in sheds by 20 per cent to 16 per sq. metre to adjust to grocery store edicts. It faces strain to change to extra pure, slower rising varieties, which take longer to succeed in their closing weight, beneath the Higher Rooster Dedication marketing campaign.
Cranswick needs to construct 20 hen sheds at its web site close to the villages of Feltwell and Methwold, and a smaller variety of new pig sheds. Regardless of its promised enhancements, resembling air scrubbers to curb emissions, it has been spurned. It’s now elevating 7,500 pigs there in ageing barns (the location has a allow for 29,000).
Whereas many want farms to be small-scale and free vary, that may have drawbacks: free-range hen farms have been blamed for some air pollution within the River Wye as a result of it’s more durable to include waste. The council dominated that Cranswick’s proposed new facility might hurt the native setting and unusually cited a 2024 Supreme Courtroom ruling on world warming and oil wells.
The marketing campaign, though largely principled, is impractical. The UK depends on intensive farming for self-sufficiency, relatively than importing EU hen and pork raised to related requirements. Firms resembling Cranswick want extra space to maintain filling supermarkets. The UK produces 1.2bn chickens for consuming a 12 months however met solely 82 per cent of poultry demand in 2023.
Cranswick can enchantment and the applying might be known as in by Angela Rayner as housing secretary. “A pig is as clear as you make it,” Bowes notes. Given the stakes for the nation, somebody ought to clear up the mess.
