1,150 hens in six mobile houses · Cransford, Suffolk
Hens on grass that moves under them, table birds that take fourteen weeks, and a Christmas list of a hundred and eighty turkeys and forty geese that has been full by October for six years running. Everything is killed and dressed here.
On the shelf this week
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How the birds live
The houses go on wheels and move every ten days so the grass gets a rest and the birds get something to eat off it. Free range rules would let us run three times as many. We would sell three times the eggs if we did, and the paddocks would be bare by August.
Not at nine when the yard is busy, and they stay open until the hens put themselves to bed. It means a fox has more hours to try, and we lost eleven birds to one last September. We have not changed the routine.
Our table birds are a slow dual-purpose cross, so the boys from each hatch are grown on for meat instead of being killed at a day old. It takes fourteen weeks and about three times the feed of a supermarket bird, and it is most of why a chicken here costs eighteen pounds ninety.
We hold a small slaughterhouse approval and a vet comes to check it. No bird of ours has ever been on a lorry. It caps us at forty table birds a week, and the old hens go into the shop as boiling fowl at £6.85 rather than being thrown in a skip, which barely covers the plucking.
“I put my name down for a goose in the August of the first lockdown and I have collected one on Christmas Eve every year since. The eggs I buy weekly, and I have taken six pullets off them for the garden, which was Peter's idea and not mine.”
Come up the track
Hollowtree Farm, Bruisyard Road
Cransford, Suffolk IP13 9PL
Cransford · honesty box out of hours, the shop is not locked
About this page
The business, the listings and the reviews are invented — this page exists to show what someone could put on poultryfarm.co.uk. The domain itself is genuinely for sale.
Or speak to Colin Squire directly — +44 (0)7990 570292 · colinsquire@yachtingmatters.com