A north farmer is being forced to change career after a restructuring by a chicken processor has left him – and at least 15 others – without an outlet for their birds.
Willie Lean will be taking on a more permanent role at The Classroom Restaurant he owns in Nairn in the wake of changes by the 2 Sisters Food Group at its Coupar Angus site, where weekly throughput was from last month cut by 225,000 chickens to 525,000 and 230 jobs axed.
Mr Lean, 41, of Mains of Kilravock, Croy, has over the last 14 years built a chicken farming operation with an annual turnover of £2million. But from April, when he sends his last batch of indoor broilers to Coupar Angus for processing, that will crash to zero.
His free-range enterprise – adjacent to the A96 trunk road at Gollanfield between Inverness and Nairn – has already stopped producing chickens. The sheds used to house the birds are now lined up in fields at the roadside empty.
He has already decided to seek a change of use for his chicken houses from agricultural to industrial use. They went on the market for commercial let earlier this week.
Mr Lean said: “Come April 2 or 3 there will be no more income coming in from chickens. I’m now having to try and salvage what I can from what’s left of my business.
“And to think I’ve just in recent months spent £28,000 putting in windows and blinds into those sheds to meet Tesco chicken production standards. Then, they (2 Sisters) said they would be restructuring, and are now going to be taking chickens out of sheds that are, I believe, 50 to 60-years-old,” said Mr Lean, who finished 84,000 birds in every batch from his sheds and did 4,500 free-range chickens a week from Gollanfield.
The restructuring at Coupar Angus has been forced because the plant was loss-making. But the changes leave chicken farmers in northern Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, Moray and Inverness-shire without an outlet. They are now deemed too far away and no longer viable for production by the dominant player in the UK chicken market, despite their offer to absorb some of the transport costs linked with collecting their birds pre-slaughter. Many have already stopped producing. Others, like Mr Lean, are on their last batches.
Production contracts have gone to those growers nearest the processing plant. But the decisions bring to an end commercial chicken production in the north and north-east, the majority of which was built on the back of the growth of the former Grampian Country Food Group.
The investment the farmers have made has been significant. Mr Lean said the 52 now empty specialist free-range houses at Gollanfield cost £6,500 each. There was then a further £75,000 investment in feed bins and equipment for them.
His broiler sheds cost £250,000, with £28,000 spent on windows and blinds last year. He ploughed £225,000 into a biomass heating system and £60,000 in solar panels to cut energy bills to make sure his operation was profitable and competitive.
Mr Lean accepts he could sell chicken locally, but said the cost of slaughter made it uneconomic. Any new poultry abattoir required 1million birds a year just to wash its face.
Mr Lean said he was lucky as he had reinvested profits from the business over the years and had minimal farm borrowing. But he still needed to earn a wage and that would now have to come from the 104-seat restaurant he bought nearly five years ago and which now employs 28 staff. The number of meals served at it under his ownership has gone from 8,000 to 39,600 last year.
He said: “I’ll be spending more time there. Already one of the managers has gone so I can get a wage out of it. We’ve two farm staff here and they will probably have to go too. The farm here is only 150 acres of crops.”
He said it was deeply disappointing that Scotland’s demand for chicken will now only be served by a handful of growers and that supplies will have to be backed up from England, where there is a huge ongoing investment in new poultry sheds to satisfy growing demand for UK chicken in the wake of the horse-meat scandal.
Mr Lean questioned why growers in northern Scotland were deemed expendable. “There’s a massive expansion in England. They’re looking for something like 400 new sheds for tens of thousands more chickens, but as an industry we cannot keep operational 15 farms up here, the majority of which have the most modern facilities in the UK. We can produce chicken here for the same price as elsewhere.
“The myth that’s perpetuated is that we’re high-cost producers. But we’ve introduced the efficiencies. We’ve invested in the biomass heating and done all the things needed to make our operations competitive with everyone else,” he added.
He acknowledged the Scottish Government’s response to the crisis and its willingness to assist through the new poultry action plan its officials developed with industry and NFU Scotland before Christmas.
But he asked what had happened to the political leaders who had turned up for photograph opportunities at the start of the crisis, but who were now nowhere to be seen as growers stopped production.
“We’re just another industry that has gone down. The poultry plan has been a great gesture, but at the end of the day nothing has changed as a result of it. None of the growers up here have a new contract, there’s been no increase in volumes and none of the retailers have given any commitment to stocking more Scottish chicken.
“We’ve fantastic facilities. We had profitable businesses; by being efficient we had a margin. But now we have nothing.”
Mr Lean said the impact of the closure of the chicken production facilities would be felt far wider.
The farms between them consumed 20,000 tonnes of grain, mostly wheat. All of that will now also have to find another home, which will probably mean it having to be hauled south and arable farmers having to endure poorer prices for their crops.