September 30, 2025
Activists halt new farms, pushing up UK chicken prices
Animal rights activists are being blamed for rising chicken prices after moves to block new poultry farms across Britain.
Plans to build a chicken factory in Lincolnshire have been targeted by a barrage of complaints, in the latest example of a coordinated campaign to halt new poultry projects.
More than 1,000 objections have been submitted to stop the Newton Grange facility, with some campaigners voicing opposition from as far away as France and Italy.
Ian Pick, an agricultural planning expert closely involved with Newton Grange, said this is just one of eight planned chicken farms that he is personally involved in being targeted by activists.
Newton Grange is poised to house up to 270,000 birds at any one time, with the proposed facility located a mile away from the nearest dwelling. The North Kesteven District council is still deciding whether the site can go ahead.
The UK's chicken consumption is rising by more than 2pc a year, with Britons eating 2.5 million tonnes of the meat.
Pick claimed that chicken prices will rise without an influx of new farms, meaning the UK will become increasingly reliant on imports from countries with lower welfare standards.
He has blamed campaigners at the Coalition Against Factory Farming (Caff) for threatening plans to create new chicken farms or expand existing ones in the UK.
Crucially, Pick said Caff is doing so by canvassing activists from afar or overseas, rather than relying on protests from nearby residents.
The group can do so by running online campaigns that encourage users to object to local projects.
This is a significant problem for councils when ruling whether new farms can go ahead, said Pick, as the local officials have to wade through hundreds of complaints.
"It's a disrupt and delay tactic," he said.
Out of the 1,000 objections to Newton Grange, it is understood that just 64 have come from locals.
Alistair Hall-Jones, a fourth-generation farmer in Lincolnshire, who is trying to build chicken sheds on his family farm, says his planning application was live for about eight weeks before it was targeted by online complaints from Caff.
That is despite no complaints from the local village, he said.
Hall-Jones claimed his new facility would not cause local disruption or significant environmental impact.
When it comes to planning, "I've ticked every box as far as I'm concerned," he said.
Hall-Jones said that if we can't meet the demand for chicken, then "affordable protein will have to come from elsewhere".
Importing chicken, he said, would come with greater emissions and from countries with lower welfare standards.
If applications don't go through, he added, it will cause the price of British chicken to rise even further. It is currently at £5.50 (US$7.38) a kilo, up from £2.85 (US$3.83) a kilo two years ago.
Richard Griffiths, chief executive of the British Poultry Council, said: "Planning permission to build or update farms is key to meeting rising demand for affordable poultry meat, higher welfare standards, and [the] Government's growth agenda.
"While we welcome scrutiny, mass campaigns often based on unfounded claims risk obstructing essential production that is feeding the nation."
The National Farmers Union points to the average shed as being 31 years old and says that planning is now the number one priority for the poultry sector.
Maya Pardo, a legal expert at Caff, said: "We help those opposed to factory farms get planning permission rejected.
"Factory farms are a serious hazard to local residents; they cause air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, health conditions, and HGV traffic.
"More widely, they emit greenhouse gases, have terrible animal welfare standards, and increase the risk of pandemics.
"Factory farms don't produce cheap food in the long run. The price may be low on the shelf, but we pay in other ways. Factory farming is wrong and imports with lower welfare standards are also wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right."
- The Daily Telegraph
