Kelly Turkeys founder Derek Kelly has had an extraordinary career spanning nine decades and counting. Michael Barker hears his story
Industry pioneer, political campaigner, MBE – you’d think that at the grand old age of 93, Derek Kelly might want to put his feet up for a bit.
Not a bit of it. On the day he spoke to Poultry Business, the Lifetime Achievement winner at the 2023 National Egg & Poultry Awards had been up at 5am and travelled to Westminster for a breakfast meeting with MPs. “I’ve no intention of retiring,” he says, giving short shrift to the suggestion he could hang up his wellies any time soon. “People retire and watch television and die the next year. I don’t do any hard physical work – I can’t do that any more. But I’m still first on the farm each morning. It’s no hardship, I just enjoy being involved.”
Kelly might have handed over the reins to his son Paul, but he remains the majority shareholder in Kelly Turkeys, the business he founded in 1971 and which has become one of the most successful and widely respected suppliers in the UK and beyond. His story is a fascinating one that took him on a journey working with some of the biggest names in the turkey business and even gaining renown in the Soviet Union along the way.
First taste of farming
Born in Durham in 1930, Kelly viewed the outbreak of the Second World War with the fearlessness of youth, describing night-time runs to air raid shelters, a shortage of food and childhood dreams of becoming a fighter pilot. A committed Boy Scout, Kelly always had an inquisitive nature and a desire to lead, and he got his first taste of farming at the age of 12 when he went potato picking near his home and instantly became hooked: “I was quicker than most at picking potatoes, so I got to lead the horse,” he recalls. “The horse was a wonderful, gentle giant Shire called Daisy. I just fell in love with farming, and from then on my parents told me that I treated the home as a hostel – I came in from school and went straight up to the farm and came back for bed time, and it was the same at weekends.”
Kelly first got involved in industry affairs when he joined the Young Farmers movement, and it was expected that, with two schoolteacher parents urging him on, he would follow his new passion into education and he followed up his stint at the Durham School of Agriculture by securing a scholarship to the University of Durham.
A reluctant student, Kelly pined for life on the farm, but when he was offered a further scholarship to take a PhD after graduation, he felt it was impossible to turn down. “I resisted strongly as I just wanted to get back on those tractors and be with Daisy, but my parents won the day again and convinced me it was an opportunity too good to miss,” he says.
While farming might have been an instant love affair for Kelly, his introduction to poultry had more to do with fate than design. “On the farm I used to milk cows, and there were cows and sheep. And so I wanted to do animal genetics for my PhD, looking at the British Friesian breed, but my university tutor wouldn’t have that. He explained that a cow only had one baby a year, whereas chickens had 200 eggs a year. Furthermore, chickens had a generation interval that was half what a cow’s was. So I had to do chickens. I was so disappointed – I didn’t know one end of a chicken from the other. But anyway, as it happened it was a turning point in my career.”
Kelly reluctantly did his thesis on chicken breeding, but by the end of the year he had quit, the pull of the farm stronger than any desire to remain in academia, and after marrying his girlfriend Mollie in 1953, he happily stayed milking cows on his father-in-law’s farm in Skipton, North Yorkshire. Things changed when a friend of Mollie’s one day noticed an advert in the Sunday Times stating that an American company called Arbor Acres, which laid claim to being the largest chicken breeder in the world, had ambitions to expand into Europe and needed a general manager. Kelly, despite his ongoing disinterest in poultry, was persuaded to go for an interview, and the job was his.
“That’s when I transferred into poultry farming,” Kelly recounts. “It was the start of the broiler boom, and the start of supermarkets. It must have been 1959, I was 29 at the time and I quite enjoyed the big business, because chickens were a big business then and just starting up, but with a lot of fully integrated operations.”
Kelly moved to Essex, spending the next couple of years driving up and down the country, renting farms, interviewing managers, sitting in on board meetings – “all I could contribute was energy,” he admits – and putting down as many parent stock chicks as possible.
His transition into turkeys came when he left Arbor Acres for Bernard Matthews. “He [Matthews] was already the largest in turkeys and had his own breeding flock,” Kelly explains, “but he had ambitions to be a breeder, as well as a producer of Christmas turkeys or all-year-round turkeys. The fact that I’d been with a chicken-breeding company got me the job. I spent three or four years with Bernard Matthews, who was a wonderful inspiration really. Socially he was wonderful, and I was his blue-eyed boy for a while and I really enjoyed it.”
Going it alone
Kelly took pleasure in absorbing the nuances of good business management. From his boss at Arbor Acres he learnt that you shouldn’t throw all your business in with one customer, even if the riches seem plentiful on the surface, while from Matthews he discovered that the commodity markets meant either making a lot of money or losing a lot, a fact that inspired him to carve out a niche for his own company rather than competing head on with the big boys.
It was a row with Matthews that prompted Kelly to branch out on his own, but if anyone were to assume that Kelly Turkeys was an instant money-spinner then they would be in for some blunt truths. Instead, the next decade was a tale of hard graft and a nomadic existence as a globetrotting poultry consultant as Kelly desperately tried to establish his new enterprise while keeping his family in the life to which they had become accustomed. “I had a cottage with a big mortgage, and no insurance,” he recalls. “I’d had a good salary [at Bernard Matthews] and you tend to live up to your salary, so I didn’t save a lot. And I had four children in private school, who I didn’t want to disturb. There was no way I could start up on my own and make a living, so for 10 years I travelled abroad and advised people on how to start up turkey operations. It was 10 years of doing that before I could pay myself and come back home and run my business. I would earn a bit of money abroad with the consultancy and come back and rent another farm, or buy some more equipment, or increase the turkey numbers. My wife and children were the unpaid labour really.”
In the 1960s, turkeys were not big business in Europe, with only Denmark, England and Ireland having serious commercial operations, but chicken producers had envious eyes for the success their turkey-producing cousins were enjoying. That gave Kelly the opportunity to earn from his knowledge, advising entrepreneurs on how to start up an integrated operation. “I made quite a good living out of that, because my little business at home wouldn’t support me,” says Kelly, who travelled all over Europe – including all the countries beyond the Iron Curtain and in particular genetic research farms in Georgia and Estonia – as he became known as the turkey expert for the Soviet Union. “It was a spartan life though, because every penny we earned, we pushed back into the company,” he points out.
Kelly started out with Wrolstad Bronze turkeys sourced from Oregon in the US. “To start with we nearly gave up because there wasn’t a market for them,” he explains. “But fortunately I didn’t because it really was one of the turning points in our life, the bronze turkey.”
Given how famous the KellyBronze name has become, it seems wild to think it was far from an instant hit. Kelly recounts an anecdote of how a competitor got up at a conference and told the audience that you’ll hear a lot about bronze turkeys – Kelly was good at publicity for his products even then – but that you’d never see them.
Hard work was crucial in those early days, and he was willing to do whatever it took to get his business going. “I actually enjoy working hard,” he says. “I remember thinking I can work night and day and make a go of this. I can jump over the moon. But I was 41 and I soon found out that when you turn 40 you can’t jump over the moon! I got a very cold awakening when I tried to work all hours and do without sleep. It was hard work, but it also wasn’t work because I really enjoyed it.”
That work ethic has never changed, and Kelly still puts in the hours every day, even finding time for a beef cattle project that sums up his commitment to keeping his mind fresh. That doesn’t mean he’s overly hands-on though, for Kelly describes ceding control of his business to his son Paul as “one of the best and proudest decisions I made in my life”, even if he freely admits it was also one of the hardest. With pleasing symmetry, Paul was 41 at the time – the same age as when Derek made the move to start the business all those years ago.
Beyond the farm
As Kelly Turkeys built its reputation, Kelly himself committed time to industry affairs, playing prominent roles on the NFU Council and at the British Poultry Council. His contribution was recognised with an MBE for services to the industry in 1998, which he received from the Queen. “It was quite an experience for a farm lad,” he says in his understated way.
Kelly appreciated that growing the company meant good marketing and educating the public on how to prepare and cook the birds, and one of the most memorable moments came in 1981 when Derek and Mollie demonstrated how to truss a turkey on leading BBC show The Generation Game. The burgeoning popularity of the KellyBronze was further underlined when Delia Smith visited the farm in 1989, making the breed her turkey of choice in her new book, ‘Delia’s Christmas’.
The following quarter century was a time of further success and accolades for the business, and for Kelly personally it culminated in him becoming one of the first seven inductees in the newly created Poultry Hall of Fame last year.
One could fill many pages recounting some of the extraordinary anecdotes of Derek Kelly’s life, but one suspects that even now he would rather look forward than to the past. He knows that life remains a challenge for poultry farmers, but appreciates that the industry will continue to find new ways to evolve as it always has. With all the talk of technology, robotics and artificial intelligence coming into the industry, though, Kelly’s advice to business owners is still very much to nurture the human element. “When a good man comes into your company, don’t look at him as an expense, look at him as an investment,” he says. “I’ve certainly learnt the lesson that it’s people who make you money and make you successful.”
People – and family – have always been at the heart of Kelly Turkeys. One of Paul’s sons, Toby, entered the business a year ago, and Toby’s sister Ella is due to join shortly. Kelly is hyper conscious that family members must be there on merit and not simply because they have the name, but one suspects that much like Paul, anyone who comes in will do so full of drive and determination to make their mark. Farming, as Kelly has proven throughout his career, is very much a lifestyle as well as just a job. And he’s still enjoying it as much today as he did in the very beginning.