As one of the elder statesmen of the UK poultry industry, Noble Foods unit manager Ted Hololob has seen a lot over the years. Michael Barker hears his story
For most people, turning 70 and marking a half-century of work on poultry farms would set their minds firmly on retirement.
But it’s safe to say that Ted Hololob, manager at Noble Foods’ Greenbrook Farm in Seamer, near Middlesbrough, is made of different stuff. Having been named Unit Manager of the Year at the 2024 National Egg and Poultry Awards at the grand old age of 69, he’s now enthusiastically taking on a new role as his energy shows no sign of abating.
Born at home in Middlesbrough in 1955 to an English mother and Polish father, Hololob wasn’t from a farming background. He says he “couldn’t wait to get out of school” at 15 and earn some money, and started as a shop assistant in his home town before realising that wasn’t the job for him and applying to be a milker on a farm at Northallerton. In what was his first exposure to the farming industry, Hololob spent two years in that role before – in one of those sliding doors moments that changed the trajectory of his life – he had a fallout with the father of the farm’s owner and left under a cloud. He admits that had that not happened, he could still be working there today.
It’s fair to say things didn’t immediately improve for Hololob. After leaving the milking job, he suffered a near fatal motorbike accident which saw him somersaulting over the handlebars and into a concrete lamppost and required a month of recuperation in hospital.
Starting out in poultry
Hololob’s stop-start career continued with a month working in a bins warehouse before he finally saw an advert for a position as a shed lad at a poultry layer farm called Eastwoods. Even that, though, saw a rough start, when he got on the wrong bus on his first day and finally turned up two hours late. “You should have seen the farm manager with his red face,” Hololob recalls. “I went into the office and he was just stood there. I tried to explain but he didn’t want to hear it.”
Hololob admits his first sight of a chicken shed took his breath away: “There were all these birds literally with their heads stuck out of the cages,” he says. “I’d never seen so many chickens in my life – it felt as though they were stacked fifteen feet high.”
Despite the setbacks, from the very first day on the job in 1974 Hololob wasn’t shy to make an impression. Given what he calls the kind of ‘daft’ task that is aimed at initiating newbies, he tried out a new way of moving the bins around and immediately impressed his colleagues with a willingness to do things differently. It was an approach that has served him well throughout his long career.
Health and safety left something to be desired in those early days. “That wasn’t even something anyone thought about,” he says. “The things we used to do in those days, you’d get the sack for immediately now. The girls used to smoke in the sheds, we’d climb on the roofs to sunbathe. It was unbelievable.”
In the years that followed Eastwoods found itself under various ownership groups – including Imperial Tobacco of all people – before landing in the hands of the Dean family of Noble Foods fame. The clampdown on cages saw the site mothballed in 2010, and Hololob faced the choice of redundancy or applying for a job on the rearing side of the business at nearby Poplar Park. “I knew about laying hens, no problem, but I didn’t have a clue about rearing,” he recalls with a smile. “It was all new to me. I dropped down to assistant manager but it didn’t bother me because at least I had a job. It’s completely different to the layer side. If I’d have known on the laying site what I know now, when I went to look at the pullets that were coming to us I would have said ‘why isn’t this like this? Where is the bloodwork? What diseases have you got around?’ But you don’t because it’s a completely different world.”
After two years at Poplar Park, the Greenbrook Farm site was opened and Hololob landed the job as manager in May 2014, where he has remained until today. Despite the upheaval of ownership, the biggest change Hololob noticed over the years was not the name over the door, however, but the amount of automation that came into the job. From the cages themselves to the feed systems, muck scrapers and even calculators replacing pen and paper, there has been a regular slew of systems to support the poultry worker.
Things have certainly changed for the business too. Today, Greenbrook rears 120,000 pullets a year, and Hololob has helped oversee a number of recent improvements including concreting to boost environmental controls for the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control permit, new bulk bins with integrated weight systems, and the addition of in-house step-up systems on all the units to ensure birds are ready to go and acclimatised to modern multi-tier laying systems.
Passion for the job
Hololob’s continued energy is admirable, and he describes “learning all the time” on the job and the fact that new challenges are always presenting themselves. His trademark approach has been not to simply imitate how others work without question, but to ask himself: is there a better or easier way to do a task and get the same results? “I like fixing things,” he observes. “I’m a farm manager, but I like fixing things. If we have a water leak, other managers will ring the maintenance guy up, but I’ll have a go myself. I’ve changed the feed motor. I like the mechanical stuff.”
A constant feature that shines through when talking to Hololob is his infectious enthusiasm for the job. He describes spending time observing the birds and learning to understand their behaviour and identify when something is wrong, and you’d never think this was somebody in the twilight of their career. He doesn’t hesitate when asked what he likes best about the job either – the variety. “I wouldn’t like being on a production line where you’re just doing the same thing,” he admits. “It would do my head in and I’d rather do voluntary work. But every day is different. I’m always self motivated and I don’t need someone to tell me what to do.”
That desire to keep things fresh is seeing Hololob make one more career change, and that comes alongside an acceptance that what he can offer is different as he approaches his 70th birthday in May. “My brain is starting to slow down and I understand that,” he says. “I can’t do this job any more, and eventually it’s going to affect me and how I work. So I asked if there was anything else that I can do instead that would give the chance for someone else to come in and do my job.”
The plan is for Hololob to progress into the role of a fieldsman, visiting other sites in the group and helping out with advice and sharing his many years of experience. He’s staying in his current role as part of a handover process until March, before taking up his new position, where he sees great potential for sharing best practice among the sites and seeing how different ways of working might be applied in other locations.
So where does Hololob’s apparently boundless energy come from? He says his father “never missed a day’s work, ever”, and also points to the fact his body has held up pretty well over the years. He even still goes several times a week to the same gym that he’s been frequenting for a quarter of a century, and makes it a priority to keep himself in shape.
With 50 years in the poultry business, it’s worth asking Hololob what advice he would pass onto the younger generations. “If you’re going to come into the industry, you should come in with the attitude of wanting to become the farm manager,” he says. “If you’re starting off as the third assistant, take it from there. We need to get young people in and try to progress them onto assistant managers and learn the trade and become managers. People come in from college and often want to work with cattle or sheep, rather than poultry where there’s a quick turnover every four months. Some people don’t want that.”
In an era when we hear that people “don’t want to work”, Hololob feels like an outlier. Even as he approaches his eighth decade, he confidently predicts he’s got another five years in the tank before he’ll be ready for retirement – and even then he might like to work a couple of days a week to keep himself sharp.
Winning an individual award after 50 years of service is special, and is another nice moment after Noble Foods took him out for a steak dinner to celebrate his milestone at the company. There were gifts of whiskey and vouchers too, in what was a well-deserved acknowledgement of his enduring contribution. And with a few years left to run and no doubt no shortage of new ideas to absorb, the poultry industry isn’t seeing the back of him just yet.