Alskade Kyckling Exploring complexities of poultry production in Sweden and what we stand for

Welcome back to another video, folks. I'm Richard and I run Rydsdal Farm in Värmland, Sweden. And there's recently been a program on SVT about the state of the chicken industry, and I feel like I'm quite uniquely placed to discuss this topic with nuance. So it's a long-form monotone video, just me talking, and I am a commercial producer of pasture-raised eggs from this lovely girl behind me, and we are also pastured broiler producers, meat chickens. Now, today's world, these are two different birds. They're hybrid birds because the production and economy is far better. As far as hybrids go, I'm not opposed to hybrids. They've been used since Mendel started crossing vegetables in England, and they're very useful in that they produce a uniform, predictable product. And if you want to make a business plan, You need that. Most of the commercially available vegetables, meats, etc. you buy in stores are from hybrids. And it's because of that uniformity and predictability. Farming is one of the hardest businesses to make work. It's incredibly hard. We've dedicated our lives to showing what's possible on the small farm and helping others do the same. But it's tough. And so uniformity is helpful. The big issue with hybrids is that we then rely on companies who often do not have the same holistic bottom line that we do. Most big companies have a financial bottom line and that's it. We're invested equally in society and in the health of the farm and the soil. And so that's the big issue and we're well aware of that. But there are such limited choices here. What this film really shows is that the food system is broken. But many of us already knew that. The education system's broken, political system's broken, the financial system's broken. We have to make choices. And so what I want to do is talk about pastured layers and pastured broilers and really try and inform you whether you're a consumer or whether you're a producer. And I want to just fill in the picture for people because it's nuanced. So to share my perspective, I was the first producer of organic pastured broilers as well as Eggmobile pastured layers here in Sweden. They didn't exist as products when we started out. In fact, we introduced many aspects of regenerative agriculture here. Now, there weren't even organic broilers in the supermarkets at that point. Things have changed a lot in that time, but I've directly trained many of the pastured poultry producers in Sweden in the farm here, or through my online training, or through our book. We detailed in our 750-page manual exactly how to run all these different farm enterprises, including time and motion studies and finances. And many people have learned from that directly, as well as our YouTube channel. And we also wrote a book which is like an IKEA manual for farmers, 3D CAD plans and build plans for Eggmobiles like you see here, which many producers in Scandinavia are using. And in fact, farmers in about 80 countries around the world are using. I'm a numbers person, I'm a business person, and so I really feel like I'm in a good understanding of the whole picture to speak to the issues. So I want to break it down. Let's start with pastured layers. So in our model, we move our birds every day or every second day at minimum, and that's really important for hygiene as well as for nutrition in the hens and in the eggs subsequently. And animals are always moving in nature, and we're copying that principle, and it's beneficial for soil health and the vibrancy of everything. Now, many of the people that are doing copycat enterprises are rarely moving their eggmobiles, sometimes not at all, once a year, sometimes once a week, once a month, but they're really not the same product. If you move your birds constantly, they will eat far more greens and they'll get access to far more insects. But the amount of insects, even in a really vibrant pasture like we've built up here at Ridgedale, is nowhere near the nutrients and protein needed for these birds. Chickens are omnivores. They're designed to eat meat proteins. That's a fact. They're really triggered by blood, and they will just— that's the cannibalism you see in those movies. They're triggered by blood. They want that nutrition. So if I was buying eggs, I would be looking for Birds Raids in this Eggmobile way. They're that are moved constantly, and I would check that with the farmer. And you can check that on Google Earth, looking at the previous moves. You can see it in the farm if they've been moving regularly. And I can guarantee you, birds that are moved every day or every second day at least will have far more nutrient in their profile, and the birds will be healthier and everything will be working better. Now, feed. Birds need a lot of feed. If you have a few chickens in your backyard, they can survive off berries and seeds and bugs, but that's not true of a commercial flock. It's no such thing as a low input, high output farm. If you want high outputs, you need high inputs. Now, bigger farms can get around a lot of problems by producing their own feeds, but we are way too small a farm to be able to do that, so we rely on buying in feeds, and we've always prioritised organic certified feed. Now, our farm is not organic certified, but that's a choice we make. We want to go beyond organic. Organic standards don't mean things are good. You know, we're in a country full of supermarkets with just one label organic that could have come from hundreds of farms to make one block of butter. We don't know. It's untraceable. It's indirect. We're very invested in direct-to-customer marketing, and we were champions of the Rico Rings here. We set up 5 Rico Rings, and I promoted them heavily on YouTube and in my trainings. And some of our students have set them up in 3 different continents now as well. They've spread obviously all over Scandinavia, and they are fantastic for giving people a sales and marketing platform, but they've allowed people to take unrealistic prices for slightly better than conventional eggs. And that's because when we set out trying to do the most excellent product possible, we set the bar for the pricing, and we saw producers copying our models but feeding conventionally. Now conventional chicken feed has issues, and it's literally 50% of the price of organic feed. But the photo of the Eggmobile and the hens looks the same. So the customer's kind of misled a bit, either intentionally or unintentionally. But I feel like the pricing of conventionally fed eggs has clawed up way too high. And it's a kind of unconscious thing in this movement. And I think if you're buying pastured eggs, you want to know your producer is moving those eggs eggmobiles every day or two, and they are feeding organically. Like, if we want a better food system, we have to do that as producers, and consumers need to drive that through their choices. Where you put your money is what you promote in the world. It's as simple as that. Now, conventional feed has got problems associated with, like, PFAs, like the chemicals that are used in farming—pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fertilizers, they all concentrate in grain products and end up in your food supply. We don't want that. We don't eat conventional food. We strive for everything to be organic or beyond organic, as we market our own food. And so we're trying to do what's right for the soil, the animals, more so than just producing a product to sell. We're trying to do the most excellent job possible. Now, with organic feeds for laying hens, you have two options. One is a meat-based protein and one is vegetable-based. We have always chosen the meat-based protein purely on an ethical stance that chickens are omnivores. They need meat protein. Methionine and some of the amino acids are really important from meat sources. Now, some people protest this because most of the meat protein is coming from the fishing industry, like waste products from the fishing industry. And there's concerns about contamination with things like PFAs, particularly in the Baltic Sea. Sweden doesn't have that big a fishing fleet, so a lot of it comes from Denmark, and there are concerns with that. But you've got to remember, those PFAs come from conventional agriculture. So if you're feeding non-organic, that's what you're getting anyway. And the Baltic is cleaning, and it's a complex issue, and the source of that animal protein is changing all the time. So it's not a fixed constant. I would still rather have that than non-organic feed, frankly. You can get vegetable-based— well, let's follow on that point. Some people will say, well, they'll get protein from bugs in the pasture, etc. But any child with a functioning brain mathematically could quickly work out there's nowhere near enough bugs in a pasture to supply the protein needs of any size commercial flock of birds. It's not possible. We can try and extend that by managing the way we graze our animals like cows and sheep before chickens to provide some insects in their cow manure. But it's nowhere near enough. You need to put feed in. Some bigger farms, as I said, can get around it all by producing their own feeds and picking up other waste streams. But that's complex. Most people aren't doing that. And a lot of us that have small farms just can't possibly do that. We're not grain producers. I'm ethically against vegetarian feeding of chickens. Some people feed dogs a vegetarian diet, but that's just weird in my mind and unethical, and I believe the same is true for poultry. But if you're a consumer or a producer, there is an option for organic certified feed that is vegetable-based. Now, if I was buying conventionally fed Hence, I would expect the eggs to be significantly cheaper, and you have to source that out in your local environment. But I would always favor organic and moved continuously. Now, we do use the meat protein because we think it makes a much healthier bird, a much more nutrient-dense product, and that's what we're interested in. And of course, there's problems, but what you find at the other end of your supermarket or wherever you shop There's problems with the food system all over. It's kind of swings and roundabouts. There's no perfect solution. So you've got to decide where you want to click into that. And I want to support organic agriculture that is at least not as bad as conventional agriculture. Now, one thing to clarify for organic certified feeds, the meat protein source, if it's from fish, it must come from sustainably labeled fishing practices. So there's a whole regulatory piece around that. I'm not an expert on fisheries. We all know that the global fishery industries are causing havoc in the ocean, but that's the same of tillage-based farming to produce empty calories and seed oils that, you know, the whole system is in poverty, you could say. Now, coming on to meat bird production, there's a lot more nuance and Public opinion seems to change as quickly as fashion trends, and I've had to promote and talk and educate customers for a very long time. And we've seen these same cycles of issues arise before. It's nothing new. Most of us are fully aware of the negative consequences of industrial farming, but we live in an industrial global marketplace and, you know, people can't afford certain things or can't take the pressure of price points being too high. So one question I didn't address, even with layers, is about using heirloom varieties, heirloom breeds. But when you run the numbers, farming is a numbers game, and the hybridized birds are just so much more effective at laying eggs. They require tighter management to keep everything healthy and functioning, but the outcome is far better and it produces perfectly fantastic eggs at a reasonable price for the farmer and the consumer. Eggs have always been an undervalued product and very high-quality protein source. However, with meat bird production, it's, it's basically impossible to produce a meat bird for everyday consumption that isn't a hybrid bird. There are very small producers doing that with breeds like Bresse, but they're typically serving that to high-end restaurants who pay a fortune for it. And it's not an everyday food, and most people don't even know how to cook a bird like that anymore. Most young people have only ever eaten breast fillets of modern broilers. So we've raised Ross 308, and we've raised Hubbard, the slower growing birds too, and they're very, very similar. Let's think about these breeds. They're fast growing hybridized birds with a F1 hybrid vigor. And we like that because they produce a known size with a given amount of food in a certain time. Now, in that documentary, they're talking about the birds getting sick at day 36 and they all start dying. That, as I've said for the last two decades, is management only. And I probably know more experientially about this than virtually anyone on earth because I've raised these birds for over one year to over 8 kilos in size, and they were still perfectly healthy. There's photos of that bird in my book. And they lived with the laying hens, they slept on roosts right up high, they laid goose-sized eggs every 2 days, and they were big and dumpy, but they were perfectly healthy, functional chickens. So I know absolutely certainly that these issues that you see in the parent stock and in production are management-based. If you put 200,000 birds in a barn with no sunlight, no air, no fresh greens, living in their own fecal contaminants, of course you get horrendous sickness outbreaks. You get deformities in the legs because they're not moving very often. You get heart failure because they're overeating, and they'll eat themselves to death. If you stick bowls of grain in front of humans and let them pig out on that, they get obese and have heart attacks and and cancers too. There's no surprise there, right? These are animals that are meant to be outdoors moving and moving a lot. So we raise our birds in small batches of 75 birds moving every day and then moving twice a day as they get bigger. And they are consuming a lot more feed because of that, because they're burning it as energy. But their muscles grow properly, their skeletons grow properly, so they don't get leg deformities and heart attacks, and they're perfectly healthy functional birds. Now the move is towards Hubbard and slower growing breeds, and I support that. It just takes longer to produce exactly the same thing, and it doesn't really affect the well-being of the bird. So the customer is just going to have to pay a little higher price for chicken, and that's unfortunate. I don't think it's necessary, but that's the way it is. Something they said in that documentary is that Norway has already banned the Ross 308s. That's true, but they have a 2-year phase-out, it seems. So by the end of 2027, they won't be using those birds anymore. I'm totally fine producing Hubbard birds. It will just, as I said, cost a little bit more, but I've raised both and they both perform very well, and I'm happy producing either. One issue in the documentary was about the health of parent birds, and there was cramped conditions, living in their own fecal matter, birds picking feathers off each other and cannibalism, etc. And that's the same in industrial egg production as well as meat production. It's just bad conditions. That's like raising animals in a medieval village. If you raise humans in a medieval village, they get sick and they have cholera and all kinds of things too. It's not good conditions. But that's a regulatory issue. And frankly, I think the regulating industry needs to do a way better better job. Those farms should not exist, simply put. But big corporations whose main function is to supply dividends to their shareholders are always going to be cutting corners and trying to just increase their bottom line. And they probably have political power to lean on governments and policymakers. There's only 5 main families that own nearly all the genetics of poultry in the globe. One of them is Swedish, right? And so you can imagine the dirty business that goes on there. It's no— shouldn't be any surprise to anyone. It's the same thing that happens in all industries. But that's really down to the regulators. Like, there is no alternative choice here in Sweden if you want chicken in your diet or other meats. You know, these are the issues that need addressing, but that requires the public to create enough outcry, and it requires regulators to do their job effectively to make sure those conditions don't exist. They don't need to exist. Like, we have no vets on our farm. We don't do sick animals. Animals don't need drugs if they're raised correctly and properly, which is what we dedicated our lives to showing people how to do whilst making a good living doing it. Feed for broilers is an interesting one. If you buy non-organic feed, They usually always contain coccidiostats, pharmaceutical drugs, and we don't really want to give our animals drugs. We want to give them healthy lifestyles so they don't need drugs, just like humans. Now, if you buy organic starter, it has to have meat protein because you can't supply the protein needs of a fast-growing meat bird without it, right? That's just basic fact. When you buy starter feed for birds the protein content is critical and you pay for the protein content. So turkeys, for example, need 28% protein in— as crude protein in their diet and when they are born, and that's really expensive feed. Broilers need about 22.8% crude protein and layers about 19%. So the feeds go down in price with the protein content. There's no vegetable option for that available currently. There are vegetable options available conventionally, but they contain the same PFAs that are sprayed on farmlands, and they contain coccidiostats, and we don't want that. I'd rather give the meat protein, which typically is fish protein here, in the starter feed. Now, we, as I said at the start of the video, were the first producers like this in Sweden, and there were no comparative farms to look to for solutions. So we did a lot of feed trials. We documented that, and we found the best way to feed healthy birds growing slower than they do in the industry organically, and that produced a very healthy bird with functional legs that didn't die of heart attacks and still produced a good economy for us, the producer. We closed the cycle by building our own slaughter facility, which was perhaps the cheapest certified facility in Europe so that we could control the entire cycle of that product to the customer. And people have been very happy about that. Now, for transparency, we have documented every single detail of that on our YouTube channel over the years. You can watch every detail of how we produce everything on the farm, from no-dig vegetables to pastured poultry to our forest-raised pork, our pasture-raised beef and lamb. And we even show the slaughter process. For those of you interested in how this work is done properly, we show you in behind every door so that you can see the entire process. That might be a bit squeamish for some of you, but if you're interested in that— because the alternative is massive facilities who are not caring for the welfare of animals in a good way necessarily. Big machines, thousands of birds an hour. We're doing this by hand and we're doing a meticulous job. We do a better job than than any facility I've ever visited anywhere in the world. And I actually train people in how to run poultry slaughter facilities. So we're really proud of that. That's a difficult question now because people are against the fishmeal in feeds because of possible PFA contaminants. But it's got to be said, those PFA contaminants are concentrated in grain production in conventional agriculture anyway. So I'm prioritizing organics and I'm prioritizing feeding an adequate nutrient-rich diet to create the performance and health of that bird, because that's what's transferring to you in your diet too. These are high-performance birds. It's like a race car. If you have a Formula 1 race car, you have to put Formula 1 race car fuel into it. You can't just go down the local petrol station and put in any regular fuel. Same with meat production birds. In the old days, there were dual-cross birds, like dual-purpose birds, where people would have egg-laying birds and then sell them as a stewing bird after. But nearly all people under 40 have never eaten a bird like that. Most people have only ever eaten boilers, and frankly, the market can't sustain the price of it, and people don't necessarily want to choose to eat that. And If you took a heritage bird into meat production, it would probably cost about €40, €45 for that bird. It would be smaller and take way longer to produce. It will have exceptional flavour, much deeper yellow fat, but there's no business to be had there really. It's not going to disrupt how these productions are done. I guess it's frustrating because there's no perfect solutions. You know, we can unpack any aspect of agriculture or other areas of our life and find problems everywhere. But what we've got to do is be realistic with how we produce now and how that can scale to change the way the food system works. So it's been an interesting process just clarifying my thoughts. And also, as I talk to bigger producers and sellers like Leafs, and I've been talking to other people, We have to make some choices, and I've been really considering this idea of inviting other people to produce under the Ridgedale brands so that we can come with a much higher level of supply for people that are needing to work with bigger volumes. And thinking about where I would put those standards of like what meets our standards, and I've done a full cycle back to where I've always stood, which is I prioritize organics. That's the baseline of food production that I want in the world. And yes, there's some issues with it, but I think they're overhyped because that supports the people that are producing conventionally. So they're going to take anything like that and push it because it's better for their business. But I still think feeding organic is my baseline standard. I wouldn't want to eat chicken that's fed conventional feed. And so you've got to decide that as a consumer. And if you're a producer and you're interested in these questions of changing the food system, you've got to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself, like, why are you in the game? If you're feeding conventionally and not moving animals regularly, that's not good enough in my mind, and it wouldn't meet our brand needs at all. But I'm interested to start to collect emails from producers in the sort of built between Oslo, Gothenburg, Stockholm. If you produce in our models to our standards, that's feeding organically, moving birds all the time, then we might be able to offer you wholesale prices that outcompete your ability to sell at retail, direct to consumer, by shifting large volumes without having to do the sales and marketing. And I'm interested to start conversations with egg producers and meat producers that are doing that, because I'm interested and invested in the wider questions about the food system. I didn't set Ridgedale up just to make my living selling veg and eggs and chicken. I set this farm up to start a revolution in the way small-scale integrity farming is done, and we've been very successful with that. And I think my attention is starting to shift towards these larger questions about the food system, and particularly that visit to Lief's last week, delivering chickens there. It really made me think that they're on the right track with the scale and of their ambition to disrupt the food system, but their limitation is going to be supply. And they can't afford to have this level of intimate relationship with every single egg producer as they scale. And so it makes sense for someone like me who has expertise, who teaches people, writes about these things, to vet for farms who I believe are doing this with enough integrity, and we can scale together logistics to make it way easier to guarantee the sale of your products at the correct price. And an important conversation I've been having with these people is also like where to set the bar, because we, we had this when we set the farm up. We want to get a good price for our products, but we don't want to just push pricing out of everyday reach. There's a sort of price point the customer can afford to pay too. And I think when you have too many small producers, people are clawing prices and it starts to get unrealistic. It's got to be fair for the farmer, for the work done, and it's got to be good for the end consumer too. So I think we need some more standardization across this movement. And I feel inspired at the moment to start to collect people together and, you know, see what we can create out of that.