Dark-brooding, trees and data transform poultry business

A focus on hen welfare and technological innovation helped a 200-hen diversification grow into a business producing and packing eggs from 2 million chickens via a network of suppliers.

David and Helen Brass are constantly looking for the next innovation to improve chicken welfare and sustainability on their own farm and the 80 farms that supply their Lakes Free Range Egg Company in Cumbria. 

See also: Why a poultry and arable unit uses ‘circular feeding’

David says: “If you improve the welfare of chickens, they’ll lay more eggs, so why not do that, because everybody benefits.”

The measures they have taken have earned them a Royal Agricultural Society of England Farm of the Future Award and they were also crowned Farmers Weekly’s 2024 Environmental Champions.

Here, some of these measures are considered in detail.

Dark brooding for chick rearing

Rearing his own pullets gives David influence over the health and development of his hens from day one.

And because many of these also populate the supplier farms, it gives him confidence that he will have good-quality eggs further down the line.

A key feature of the pullet rearing system is dark brooding, a method developed in the Netherlands that emulates brooding under a hen.

Canopies run the length of the rearing sheds to provide chicks with a warm and dark resting space.

This allows the temperature in the shed to be reduced to 28C instead of a more typical 32C, because the cooler, open part of the building encourages the birds to be more active when they are not resting under the warmer, tent-like brooders.

As David explains: “If you’re on a beach and it’s 32C, do you eat and exercise or sit on a sunbed and have a cold drink? More likely the latter.

“So that logic is applied to dark brooding – if you make the overall temperature of the shed cooler, the chicks can race about and eat in the cooler areas.

The canopies are removed when the chicks are five weeks old.

Although he has no scientific proof, David is confident these birds range better on the layer farms.

“They are more active around the place and are significantly better feathered because of the cooler shed temperature,” he says.

“They are also more co-ordinated and spatially aware because they have been more active so are less likely to break bones.”

Average mortality up to 16 weeks is about 0.75%, which David says is around half the average for a standard rearing system.

The one minor downside of dark brooding is that it adds labour, he points out, as there is more equipment to clean at turnaround.

Planting trees on ranges

To qualify for egg price premiums, a minimum of 20% tree cover is needed on the total area of land designated for birds to range on, so this is a requirement for all Lakes Free Range Egg supplier farms.

David had 20% tree cover long before it became an industry standard.

He recalls: “I went to a customer looking for more money for my eggs because we had planted trees on the ranges for our hens, which we thought was good for welfare.

“But there wasn’t much science around how good or otherwise it was for bird welfare, so they asked me for that proof.”

This resulted in him working with that company and FAI Farms on the research.

“We spent five years looking at the behaviour of birds when there were trees on ranges, and it clearly showed benefits – the hens looked better, they were healthier and less likely to die,” he says.

In fact, a benefit was seen at just 5% tree cover. “The research showed that more [cover] was unnecessary, but it just didn’t look right.

“We thought 20% looked about right, so that’s where we set our stall – although most of our producers have gone beyond that, to 25%.”

There are multiple reasons why trees on the range are better for the birds and the egg production, he explains.

“They give shelter in the winter and shade in the summer, and in the summer that means better quality and better coloured eggshells.

“It makes sense that if you look after the chicken, it will lay more eggs, so you are not only doing the right thing for welfare and biodiversity, but also making more money because production increases and fewer birds die.”

Trees improve drainage on the range too, he adds. “The roots open up the drainage so it’s always drier under the trees, which means the birds can dust-bathe on just about any day of the year.”

Sensors for data in real time

Sensors that relay data in real-time on everything from feed quality and usage to ammonia levels and shed temperature are installed in the housing of all the egg suppliers.

David commissioned his own software to enable this after a suspected feed issue flagged up the benefits of having data captured in real-time to analyse.

Hens on some of the supply farms had reduced feed consumption, but establishing if this was linked to a specific batch of feed took at least a week because of the lack of real-time information.

“The farmers made a guess at it being a feed-related issue because we couldn’t pinpoint to the hour when a specific batch of feed was introduced,” he explains.

A software developer produced a bespoke system and David installed sensors that were resilient to the environment inside a poultry shed.

“You can buy cheaper sensors, but they get clogged with dust, red mites and other material and stop working,” he says.

If the sensors had been in place when the suspected feed issue had occurred, David says it would have been possible to pinpoint precisely what the problem had been.

“[Now,] we can look at the data from every farm to see what is happening when a farm started using a batch of feed.”

Farmers can also compare their performance with other supply farms and learn from each other.

David is now taking use of real-time data to the next stage, researching the acoustics of chickens and analysing those sounds to interpret their mood – for example, when they are unwell or generally not happy.

“We have had funding from Innovate UK to do this research and are hoping to get to a point where use of acoustics will help us tell if a chicken is succumbing to illness even before that becomes apparent,” he says.

This could allow an intervention, for example introducing an appetite stimulant or changing the ration, before the bird requires antibiotics or another more costly treatment.