Egg producer Joe Orgee is leading the charge to a more sustainable poultry industry with a raft of initiatives on his Herefordshire farm. Michael Barker reports
Sustainability is the word on everybody’s lips right now, with entire conferences dedicated to how farmers and food suppliers can meet the critical needs of a warming planet.
That means that every producer, big or small, is putting greater thought than ever before into how to farm with the environment front of mind, and one of the most impressive examples in the past year has been Joe Orgee, who beat off strong competition to win the Sustainable Farming Award at the 2023 National Egg & Poultry Awards.
Orgee produces free-range eggs for Noble Foods’ Happy Egg Co. brand from his family farm in the heart of rural Herefordshire. Joe and his father John – who have worked on the farm for a combined 80 years – have 48,000 Lohmann hens on their mixed 220-acre site, which also has an arable suckler herd. An integrated operation, the farm’s arable is split between cattle feed and selling back to Noble Foods’ milling business on back loads of chicken feed, with a small amount forwarded on to rapeseed oil production, reducing overall wastage.
The farm is Red Tractor and FABBL (Farm Assured British Beef and Lamb) accredited for all of its outgoing and incoming produce. Orgee uses Big Dutchman 264 systems in his poultry sheds, along with an automated packing robot and a reverse osmosis water treatment plant for all the livestock on site. The farm runs its poultry out in 60 acres of old pasture and two-year westawolds, and even jointly runs cattle and chicken in the same pasture for periods of the year. Throughout the farm’s ranges, Orgee has planted several hundred trees at four-metre spacing, which he says are becoming very well established, and regularly replaces poor or damaged trees to give a uniform pattern of growth and shelter.
When you see the vast range of sustainability commitments going on at the Orgees’ farm, it’s not hard to understand why they won the award. “We are striving to become an efficient, cost-effective business while promoting the use of natural resources and actively reducing our carbon footprint, and by using the power of nature to potentially reduce pollutants – such as phosphate – as much as possible,” Orgee explains.
The initiatives are myriad, and cover everything from energy conservation to water and manure. Orgee and his team have installed LED lighting in the poultry units to reduce running costs and carbon usage, while maintaining effective lighting at regular periods of the day for the birds. The farm uses borehole water, which passes through a reverse osmosis process to remove bacteria, greatly reducing bird scouring and improving water hygiene for the livestock. There are also solar panels on the sheds, and during the summer months Orgee closely manages the farm’s workload around the best sun of the day to vastly reduce energy consumption and take advantage of the natural energy source. Any excess energy the farm creates is exported straight back to the grid.
The business was able to gain funding to build a single-purpose manure store, which is connected directly to the belt system in all the poultry buildings to reduce handling each time they muck out. The manure itself only has contact with the outdoors while being hauled away, either to Orgee’s own ground or to be exported outside of the region, to areas with depleted levels of phosphate. The exported manure is mainly transported to Worcestershire or the Cotswolds.
Orgee and his team avoid field tumps of chicken manure and spread directly on to a green crop or cultivate immediately, with the driest floor manure taken by a local fruit farm to be placed under growing trees to reduce their fertiliser usage.
The current process at the end of the poultry cycle has changed for the better over the past five years too, Orgee explains. “The farm traditionally power washed the units for seven to 10 days using 140,000 litres of water, and the empty period of 12-18 days has now been replaced with dry cleaning, which can be done in just five days with a total empty period of seven to 10 days,” he says. Orgee also recently decided to wash sheds every third crop, spending just 1.5 days per shed and using 14,000 litres per day – totalling 63,000 litres of water, which represents a reduction of more than half compared to what was used previously.
While the major focus has been on sustainability initiatives, Orgee has also recently invested in a new packer to help speed up time spent in the egg room and allowing the team to spend more time with the hens. He has also recently bought up some additional land near to his farm with the intention of one day processing his own feed on-site for the hens, which would further help with his farm’s sustainable footprint. For the medium term there’s an ambition to put into place emergency infrastructure to battle extreme weather conditions.
Despite the many positive developments at the farm, Orgee remains concerned about some of the wider issues facing the poultry industry, not least ongoing uncertainty over energy prices and interest rates, and the ever-increasing targeting of farmers by action groups.
Orgee puts his success down to attempting to solve any problems at the early stages, and he says identifying potential future issues motivates him to act quickly and work with others to achieve a solution. “Winning the Sustainability Award shows that the family and business are continuing to adapt to new challenges, as this needs to be done to avoid being left behind,” he concludes. “I’m really proud of the reputation that being at the forefront of solving issues such as pollution has given us.”
Transforming wetlands
In 2022, Joe Orgee and his father John spearheaded a new wetlands project to radically improve how the farm interacts with the local environment, in a climate of rising phosphate levels across the Wye & Usk region.
The joint wetland venture between Noble Foods, the Orgee family and the Wye & Usk Foundation (WUF) has been installed as an attenuation feature on the farm, taking rainwater from its roofs, yards and field drains to help slow the flow of water from the site, improve water quality and reduce flood risks. “It’s a nature-based solution that is a win-win for all stakeholders – for farmers, for the environment, for local wildlife and for improving biodiversity,” Orgee explains.
In mixed rows, each of the 11 connected pools were planted with a mixture of grasses, vegetation and reeds. By the 2023 growing season, the plants established into a typical wetland, with foliage covering the water’s surface.
It has been noted that the wildlife now benefiting from the pools has greatly increased including deer, bees and aquatic pond species. Orgee also hopes one day to install trail cameras to properly gauge the increase of biodiversity.
The creation of the nature-based solution has been designed to deliver several environmental benefits, the company noted. The three key benefits are:
Improved water quality
The pools provide additional benefits by trapping traces of excessive nutrients and reducing the nutrient load of the water before it reaches the nearby brook. The plants chosen have nutrient-hungry properties, especially for the nutrient phosphorus, which is a particular concern in the Wye catchment. The system has been designed to provide the longest possible retention time in each pool to allow time for the plants to do their work.
Natural flood management
To increase the capacity of the farm’s current attenuation pond, the series of 11 wetland pools is linked together. The new vegetation in the pools physically slows down the flow of water through the system and provides extra capacity to store excess water in heavy downpours, releasing it slowly once peak flow has passed.
Improved biodiversity and habitats
The 11 pools have been planted with 12 different species of vegetation and grasses. They will colonise with other plants from the surrounding area, to form a new, vibrant habitat, providing forage for birds, nectar for pollinators and insects, and an aquatic habitat for amphibians as well as a water source for other wildlife. Vegetation covering the water surface greatly reduces the attraction for other waterfowl – a key measure to deter the spread of avian flu.
“The project has created a test site for everyone to learn from and hopefully gain benefits for the wider industry and farming community,” Orgee stresses. “Before the AI housing order was in place, my father and I welcomed several neighbouring farmers to our farm to tour the wetland pools and see for themselves how simple and effective the nature-based solution is and how they could adopt similar measures on their own sites. Representatives from the WUF were also on hand to talk with local farmers about the benefits and mechanics of installing such wetland pools.”
In their latest tests, the Wye & Usk Foundation found a 53% reduction in total phosphorous levels in nearby brooks since the work.
Related to the wetland project at Orgee’s farm, Noble Foods pointed out that it wanted to commit wholeheartedly to the work in the Wye & Usk region by signing up to the Water Roadmap, which is part of the Courtauld Commitment 2030. The Water Roadmap has an overall target that by 2030, 50% of fresh food is sourced from areas with sustainable water management.