In a field outside the village of Kehelland, near Camborne in Cornwall, a brood of hens are doing their thing – clucking, scratching, pecking at the ground, ranging freely among the grasses, crimson clover and kale. “All right, girls?” says Pete Olds, picking one up and cradling her fondly. They are bovans brown laying hens and he has 14,000 of them, which sounds a lot but is actually quite small in poultry farm terms.
Cornhill Farm has been in his family for four generations, though they have only kept poultry for a couple of decades. Before that they grew mainly cauliflower and raised beef cattle. They do have a bit of arable land now, but that is connected to the hens. “They are quirky little characters. It is a business, but you’re also looking after animals, caring for them as best you can. You’re a happy girl, aren’t you?”
I can’t tell how happy a hen is, but these ones certainly look healthy. This is the opposite of those shocking reports where someone goes into a battery hellhole with a hidden camera. These hens have a pretty nice life; the main danger round these parts comes not from Fantastic Mr Fox, but from above when a black-backed gull flies inland for a chicken takeaway. Even retirement isn’t so bad here. Well, it exists – they are rehomed into domestic environments where they will continue to cluck, scratch and lay, if less prolifically. Most poultry farm birds, once they reach 80 weeks … well, it is best not to ask.
At night the chickens come home to roost – literally rather than metaphorically – and Olds leads me into this shed. It is maybe a little less rurally idyllic inside: there are a lot of birds quite close to each other; it is a loud, full-on cluckophony. And a radio blares out Radio 1 – “They don’t want Jeremy Vine anyway,” says Olds. (I didn’t ask whether the radio is for the birds or the packers, or what they have against JV.) Anyway, the hens are free to go outside as they please during the day.
It is in the shed that they lay their eggs, in nest boxes that lead on to a conveyor belt that runs along the centre. Most of the laying happens in the morning – it is now early afternoon – but looking down the conveyor I can see a few late arrivals. Olds presses the button, the belt clatters into life and brings us an egg – and another and another. The third is still warm, as fresh as they come. This lovely warm brown egg can be our egg, the one we follow.
First a quick recap on its journey so far. Before its short trundle along the conveyor belt, the egg was – no more than a few minutes ago – expelled from the rear of a bovans brown. “Euuurgh,” say the kids who come here on school trips. “You’ve got to educate people about where their food comes from,” says Olds. “And it comes out of their bums – you’ve got to tell the kids that.” It is impossible to say which hen’s bum, but one of 3,200 in this shed, and there are four on Cornhill Farm.
And where did the hen come from? Duh, an egg – even the children know that. A fertilised egg, though, and not from here. Olds gets 16-week-old hens – pullets – from a poultry farmer in Dorset, who in turn gets one-day-old chicks from a hatchery. Hens start to lay properly at around 20 weeks. A 16-week-old pullet now costs more than £6, up from £5.15 a year ago. That is the first of Olds’ cost increases. There are more; we’ll come to them later. But first to the other end of the egg’s journey …
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In my family we get our eggs from Waitrose because my missus is an egg snob and posh (we’re talking frittata here – that’s where they are generally going, not egg and chips). We get most things from Lidl but eggs have to be Waitrose. Olds’ eggs used to go to Waitrose; they don’t any more, or to any supermarket, but we’ll come to that too.
Six large free-range eggs now cost £2.50 at Waitrose, or 41.7p each. In May last year, they cost £2.10. So a rise of 40p – or 16%. In Lidl, large free-range eggs are considerably cheaper – £1.65 (we need to have a serious conversation about this in my house). A year ago, they were £1.15, so up 50p or 43%. On average, the price of eggs has risen by 30% in a year.
Of course, everything in your trolley has gone up in that time thanks to food inflation, which you might just have noticed. By 19%, so massively, but eggs even more massively. Vladimir Putin is partly to blame. “When Ukraine was invaded by Russia that led to feed prices – the price of wheat particularly, and soya – going up enormously,” says Robert Gooch, the CEO at the British Free Range Egg Producers Association (BFREPA). “Sixty to 70% of the cost of producing an egg, or any poultry product, is the price of feed.”
Feed is the mixture of cereals hens eat. For Olds, that percentage of total cost is a little lower, about 50%, because they grow their own wheat, barley and oats (the hens like oats, he says – it keeps them calm). Still, it is by far the biggest cost and there are big hikes within that, too. The vegetable oil that goes into the feed went from around £1,000 for 1,000 litres to £2,500 at one point. To harvest your crops you need a tractor; the tractor needs fuel, which went up in cost too, from around 70p a litre to £1.30 (thanks again, Vlad), though it is back down to about 70p again.
Feed prices have also dropped to £335 a tonne from £414 in May 2022. “They’ve gone down steadily since the Black Sea ports have been able to export wheat,” says Gooch. The damage was done then, though, because, he explains, supermarkets didn’t increase what they pay the farmers in line with the farmers’ higher costs. As well as Mr Putin, we can point the finger at Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose, Morrisons, Lidl etc. “The whole stupid thing could have been dealt with if supermarkets paid farmers according to their costs rather than according to demand and supply, which is how they do it,” says Gooch. “They weren’t short of eggs last year when costs went through the roof, so they said: ‘Right, we’re not paying you any more.’”
Bird flu is a serious worry for poultry farmers, not least because it is either impossible or incredibly expensive to insure against. An outbreak would be devastating. It is why Olds’ hens weren’t free to range over the winter – they were shut in: flockdown. But avian influenza isn’t a new winter issue; it has been around for five years out of the last seven, says Gooch. “In the context of what has happened in the last year to egg prices, it has very little bearing. The predominant problem was lack of profitability due to the cost of inflation which wasn’t compensated for by the retailers.”
A year ago, British free-range egg farmers were, on average, losing 41p per dozen eggs. “I warned the supermarkets that farmers would go bust and they wouldn’t have any eggs, which is what happened. Now they can’t find any eggs and they’re paying as much as they can for anyone who has got eggs,” says Gooch. “The high prices now are because of a shortage of eggs since November, because farmers did go bust. Natural supply and demand in the markets mean that when there is a shortage, the price rises.”
Early this year, Ged Futter, a retail analyst and former Asda buyer, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that British egg farmers were quitting “every week”. BFREPA estimates that a quarter of egg farmers have stopped production – temporarily or for ever. And a third have reduced their flocks.
Fifty miles east of Olds, another Cornish egg producer, Helen Davey, has done precisely this. She tells me that when she started in the business 25 years ago, a tonne of feed cost £125 and the wholesale price she was getting for eggs was 90p a dozen. Last year, when the price of feed was more than triple that, she was getting £1.10 a dozen. “There was no margin in the eggs that were sold wholesale, so we reduced our numbers by a third,” she says.
It helped that hers is a mixed farm and a diverse business, and that they deliver their eggs locally. “If I hadn’t had my own egg rounds, I would have got rid of the lot.”
Back at Cornhill Farm, that is how they now operate, delivering their own eggs locally. A couple of years ago, when they had a supermarket contract, it would have been a different story – the usual one – for our egg, fresh off the conveyor belt. A packing company would have come to collect it on a pallet, and taken it away to a depot to be graded and packaged. Our egg – my egg, as I’m beginning to think of it – would have got lost in the retail machine before emerging in the egg aisle of Waitrose somewhere, sold for a healthy profit and then made into frittata.
That’s why Olds got out. “There’s too much margin being taken out by someone else, and the raw producers don’t see enough of it,” he says. “We wanted to be an independent farm, and we can only do that if we take destiny into our own hands.”
Their destiny and their eggs. He takes me and my egg on the short walk across the yard, past where his dad, Len, at 68 very much still active on the farm, is helping with the installation of a new grain dryer, to the packing shed, where Holly Murphy is grading and packing. Murphy is one of nine employees – one on arable, the rest on eggs, all local. They have got more expensive too. The hourly rate has recently gone up by a pound; the lowest rate is £12 an hour.
Murphy confirms that my egg is large. She will pack it into one of Cornhill Farm’s branded cardboard egg boxes, the price of which recently rose 30% to about 12p each. Another cost rise is energy, but you know all about that.
It now costs Olds, on average, £1.62 to produce a dozen eggs. Or 13.5p an egg. That’s with packing and packaging (Murphy plus cardboard boxes). Without them – which is the stage at which they used to be collected – it costs £1.46 a dozen. He looks up the price the packing company they used when the eggs went to a supermarket is paying: for large eggs, £1.47 a dozen – a margin of a penny. That £1.47 is up from an average of £1.18 over the last year, meaning they would have been losing 28p a dozen, and … Out comes the calculator … £71,300 down on the year. “That’s exactly why people said: ‘We can’t carry on.’”
It’s so frustrating, Olds says, because there are great British farms producing quality food. “We just want to be paid fairly for it. That is the bottom line, and farmers are feeling the system is broken and the supermarkets have got too much say in it all.”
For now, his eggs don’t go to supermarkets. They go to farm shops, cafes and restaurants, nearly all in west Cornwall. They pay him £2.60 a dozen for large ones. So my egg won’t be going far. It might go into a breakfast at Jenn’s Diner up the road in Redruth. Or the other way to the shop on Trevaskis Farm, or into one of the cakes in the restaurant, or a bit further to the food bank in St Ives. Except that it isn’t actually going to any of those places. This one, and five others, is coming home on the train with me, to be soft-boiled for tea. With soldiers.
• This article was amended on 19 May 2023 because an earlier version gave prices for fuel used for tractors that in fact related to vegetable oil used in poultry feed. The correct prices for each of these items have now been included.
