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Standing in Cherry Tree Farm in Norfolk, I watch 25 pigs in an indoor pen. The next time I come across them, they could be bacon or pork in the Tesco Finest range, which the farm supplies. They are being fed to a final weight of about 100 kilos before slaughter, snuffling around, and doing what pigs do.
There is a faint, acrid smell from 6,400 animals held in pens in seven sheds, whose ammonia-infused waste is mucked out each day. It is not new: this has been a pig farm since the 1960s, although the scale is greater and environmental rules are stricter. “The farm stank far worse than this before,” remarks Charles Bowes, the latest of the family to run the farm.
But Cherry Tree and other intensive pig and chicken farms owned by Cranswick, the FTSE 250 food producer, are now struggling against opposition from locals and animal welfare and environmental campaigners. Bowes faces regular complaints from one nearby resident in particular, although the Environment Agency has “only confirmed strong odours on a few occasions”.
This culminated in April when Cranswick’s plan to build a “megafarm” to raise 14,000 pigs and 714,000 chickens at a time at an existing pig farm near two Norfolk villages was rejected by the borough council. It drew thousands of objections, including from Terry Jermy, Labour MP for West Norfolk, who declared it was “not the kind of farming this country wants or needs.”
Cranswick’s reputation was further damaged last week by the revelation in the Mail on Sunday of cruelty, including killing piglets with blunt force, at one of its 400 pig farms. Its shares fell by 9 per cent as supermarkets suspended supplies from the Lincolnshire farm, which had been certified by the Red Tractor “farmed with care” scheme. Cranswick describes the mistreatment as “wholly unacceptable.”
That contrasts with Cranswick’s growth in recent years, with its share price rising by 74 per cent since May 2023 to a market capitalisation of £3bn. It was founded in 1975 to make pig feed but has steadily expanded, entering chicken farming in 2016. Its shares recovered on Tuesday to a record high as it announced a 14.6 per cent rise in pre-tax profits for the year to March.
Like the odour at Cherry Tree Farm, an air of unreality hangs over the anti-Cranswick campaign. The cruelty in Lincolnshire was reprehensible and the company must prove it was isolated. But it generally conforms to supermarket-monitored welfare and environmental standards and its practices are akin to many farms.
Take one Cranswick chicken farm I visited, where 33,000 eggs per shed are laid out on straw to hatch. The fast-growing chickens that emerge spend their brief lives in sheds, pecking at bales for up to 38 days before being slaughtered. Nearly 300,000 chickens are raised at a time at a nearby Cranswick farm with eight sheds.
There are no cages and welfare standards have tightened. Cranswick just increased the space per bird in sheds by 20 per cent to 16 per square metre to comply with supermarket edicts. It faces pressure to switch to more natural, slower growing varieties, which take longer to reach their final weight, under the Better Chicken Commitment campaign.
Cranswick wants to build 20 chicken sheds at its site near the villages of Feltwell and Methwold, and a smaller number of new pig sheds. Despite its promised improvements, such as air scrubbers to curb emissions, it has been spurned. It is now raising 7,500 pigs there in ageing barns (the site has a permit for 29,000).
While many prefer farms to be small-scale and free range, that can have drawbacks: the River Wye has been polluted by free-range chicken farms because it is harder to contain waste. The council ruled that Cranswick’s proposed new facility could harm the local environment and strangely cited a 2024 Supreme Court ruling on global warming and oil wells.
The campaign, although largely principled, is impractical. The UK relies on intensive farming for self-sufficiency, rather than importing EU chicken and pork raised to similar standards. Companies such as Cranswick need more space to keep filling supermarkets. The UK produces 1.2bn chickens for eating a year but met only 82 per cent of poultry demand in 2023.
Cranswick can appeal and the application could be called in by Angela Rayner as housing secretary. “A pig is as clean as you make it,” Bowes notes. Given the stakes for the country, someone should clear up the mess.