Coming home to roost: residents rise up against UK chicken megafarms

The signs dotted around the idyllic village of Thelnetham in Suffolk are decidedly uninviting. One reads: “Serious fowl play, stay away!”

In the village hall, around a dozen residents gather to explain: they are standing against a planning proposal that would replace a local pig farm with broiler chicken breeding units. They fear the change will bring traffic, bad smells and pollution. Reports submitted by the farm owner claim the breeder units, which would house just under 40,000 birds, will smell less than pigs and produce lower levels of pollutants like ammonia.

But trust is low in the wake of revelations that East Anglia’s intensive animal farms regularly breach environmental regulations. So Thelnetham parish council has had an independent air quality and odour report done as West Suffolk council considers the application.

Thelnetham residents have reason to be optimistic. In Methwold and Feltwell, some 20 miles north-west, locals fought a years-long “David and Goliath” battle against the meat giant Cranswick, according to Denise Charlesworth-Smith, co-founder of the Cranswick Objection Group.

The company wanted to redevelop farm sites to house more than 700,000 broilers and 14,000 pigs. But King’s Lynn and West Norfolk borough council rejected the proposal on 3 April, citing environmental concerns. Cranswick owns Crown Chicken, which is the firm that would be supplied by Thelnetham’s breeder farm.

Cranswick told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) that proposals such as this one “represent modern, sustainable, higher-welfare poultry farming that will ensure a continued supply of British product on our supermarket shelves”. It said the UK should produce more food domestically using modern, efficient and sustainable methods to avoid damaging food prices, economic growth and employment opportunities.

Chicken meat production in the UK has increased by almost 70% over the last three decades, with more than a billion broiler birds slaughtered last year. But now, this industrialised farming system faces something of a reckoning from the growing number of people concerned about its costs to animal welfare, the environment and public health.

In the Wye and Severn catchments, the spike in intensive poultry production has been blamed for water and air pollution. There, campaigners are trying to stop the “megafarm” expansion in the courts. In a landmark hearing last week, campaigners began trying to overturn Shropshire county council’s decision to approve planning permission for a new “megafarm” in the Severn catchment area. The contamination of the Wye with farm waste is also the subject of a forthcoming legal action.

But despite this opposition and the impacts of poultry “megafarms”, they’ve received millions of pounds in government subsidies, TBIJ revealed last week, prompting calls for the government to fund a more sustainable system.

Chicken is cheap

According to the British Poultry Council, more than two thirds of poultry meat consumed globally derives from the UK. This is due to the millions of breeding birds (either as chicks or hatching eggs) that are exported every year in a trade worth around £140m. The two companies that dominate the broiler-breeding sector – Aviagen and Cobb – both have operations here.

But these companies also supply chicks to breeding farms in the UK. Their offspring are then raised on broiler farms, mostly in intensive units. This sort of factory farming has been linked to multiple animal health and welfare concerns in recent years, prompting much of the criticism the industry has faced.

These days, almost half of the meat Britons eat is poultry – a remarkable success for an industry that took off in the 1950s marked by promotions such as Sainsbury’s 1958 marketing campaign “Chicken is cheap.”

Around that time, scientists discovered that antibiotics were useful in animal farming. The drugs enabled quick and effective treatment for diseases and, when used “preventatively”, could stop an entire flock of poultry from catching infections. In other words, more birds could be kept in less space, without the accompanying risk of disease. What’s more, some antibiotics had a remarkable capacity for “growth promotion” – or fattening birds up.

But the widespread antibiotic use in farming comes at a cost: the heightened risk of drug-resistant infections, which can spread to humans. And despite warnings – as far back as the landmark Swann report in 1969 – government action has been slow.

In the EU, a ban on the use of antibiotics as growth promoters wasn’t adopted until 2006. Three years ago, further EU laws banned almost all routine antibiotic use in farming, meaning the drugs can only be given to sick animals – not whole flocks. The UK, which left the EU in 2020, updated its rules around farm antibiotics in May 2024 but the regulations were criticised of falling short of EU equivalents.

Given the link between poultry meat and food poisoning diseases – including campylobacter and salmonella – particular concerns arose about the spread of potentially deadly drug-resistant variants. These evolved due to the use of strong antibiotics on farms, including a class known as fluoroquinolones. Nonetheless, fluoroquinolones were increasingly used in the UK years after evidence highlighted the public health risks, as a 2016 TBIJ investigation revealed.

Caged by their bodies

The UK poultry industry began collecting data on its antibiotic usage in 2011 and in recent years has managed to slash use by over 80%. It has cut use of antibiotics important for human healthcare by nearly 99%.

But despite these reductions, the legacy of antibiotic use – and overuse – in poultry production remains. TBIJ has found that certain strains of drug-resistant bacteria have stayed in human circulation for years after the drug in question ceased being used on farms.

Griffiths indicated that eliminating antibiotic use from poultry production altogether was not feasible. “I don’t think that’s possible and anybody who says it is, is I think naive,” he said.

However, Compassion in World Farming, an NGO, has highlighted that further reductions could be made by minimising the use in broiler farming of fast-growing breeds, which account for around 95% of chicken on our supermarket shelves. These chickens have been shown to need more antibiotics than breeds that grow more slowly and, according to researchers in Poland, can be left with weaker immune systems and therefore less able to fight infections.

Fast-growing birds are the result of selective breeding, the process by which companies maintain lines of pedigree birds with certain desirable traits. It is ultimately geared to keeping production costs – and meat prices – down and has prompted various animal welfare concerns, producing breeds of modern broiler chickens that grow at a far quicker rate than their ancestors.

Selective breeding has “fundamentally altered” the birds’ body shape, according to a 2024 paper by Royal Veterinary College scientists, while other experts have said the process harms chickens’ physical health and behavioural capacities.

Companies say they practise “balanced breeding” by including health and welfare traits in selection – but the scientists say these efforts have only “a limited effect” in reducing welfare problems.

Aviagen told TBIJ that modern poultry breeding “has a very strong emphasis on selection for improved welfare through the improvement of skeletal and metabolic fitness, ultimately resulting in improved liveability at the farm level”. Its breeding has improved leg health, gait and contact dermatitis, the company said, and added that it has long aimed to improve welfare alongside sustainability.

The broiler industry also insists that welfare is largely determined by farm management, not breed.

But while welfare is underpinned by good management, “fast growing broiler chickens are effectively ‘caged’ by their bodies, which is highly determined by their genetics”, said Hillary Dalton, senior research manager at Compassion in World Farming.

The Soil Association has called for a ban on all new intensive poultry units and a transition to sustainable, higher-welfare production.

A 2023 report by the Social Market Foundation thinktank pointed to human consumption as the root cause of the issue. “Animal welfare in the UK is first and foremost an issue of broiler chickens,” said research director Aveek Bhattacharya, one of the report’s authors. “Things are unlikely to improve unless we confront our growing reliance on cheap chicken.”

Social impacts

As well as its effects on the animals, intensive farming also generates lots of manure. When spread on farmland, its contents can run into waterways, leading to damage from an overgrowth of algae that blocks sunlight, starving other organisms of oxygen. Some UK rivers near livestock farms, including the Wye, were also awash with superbugs and antibiotic residues, a TBIJ investigation found.

Less intensive systems do not present the same waste management problem, according to Annie Rayner, co-founder of Impeckable Poultry, a Shropshire-based project developing a blueprint for regenerative egg and chicken meat production using slower-growing breeds. Here, birds are pasture-raised, which means a proportion of their waste is “directly incorporated into soils” where microbes break it down.

As well as polluting rivers, chicken production also generates ammonia, a form of airborne nitrogen pollution, which TBIJ revealed last year to be surging in the UK’s poultry production hotspots.

Harmful airborne particles can be created when ammonia mixes with other gases, which is a human health hazard. Ammonia can also harm biodiversity, particularly lifeforms like lichens. These colourful splodges found on tree branches and other outdoor surfaces are ecologically important, capturing carbon, sheltering invertebrates and serving as food or nest materials for animals, said field lichenologist Anthony Speca.

Lichens are “incredibly resilient”, he added. Some of them even survived being attached to the outside of the International Space Station. But nitrogen is “kryptonite” to many lichens, so their diversity in ammonia-polluted areas diminishes, leaving only nitrogen-tolerant ones behind.

Speca said they offer proof that our ecosystems are heading in the wrong direction: “Lichens are your canaries in the coal mine.”

With the future of the UK “megafarms” at a crossroads, Rob Percival, head of food policy at the Soil Association, said the government needs to drive industry-wide reform.

“Public money should be supporting higher welfare and sustainable production,” he said. “Not propping up the intensive chicken industry that is killing UK river habitats.”