THERE are plans in the works for a new meat processor on Kangaroo Island, but it's not what you may think.
Stokes Bay farmers Will and Jenny Stanton are growing meat birds and the expanding business was recently a recipient of a $100,000 post-fire recovery grant to build a 'poultry micro-abattoir' on the Island.
The Stantons' online poultry venture, called Kangaroo Island Primal Harvest, was established in March last year.
Mr Stanton had always wanted to grow chickens, particularly since the closure of Ordway's KI Poultry in the December of 2000, and the couple saw it as an "untapped market given KI's pristine environment and clean, green image".
"We also don't have any foxes over here, so we have minimal predation," Ms Stanton said.
"It means we can run our chickens completely free range, plus with Will's ingenuity, our chickens are pastured as well."
Mr Stanton has turned eco-shelters into portable structures, enabling the meat birds to be moved onto fresh pasture every day.
"There's no fences or cages to keep the predators out - full freedom - a big step up from free range," Mrs Stanton said.
"Will has also installed solar-operated fans in the shelters, making it nicer on those hot days."
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The birds are also fed a 15-ingredient ration, which includes biochar, apple cider vinegar, fish meal, corn, meat meal, tallow, and homegrown grains.
They have their own mill on-farm.
"It's a diverse mix, but we are what we eat, and we are what our food eats, so we want to make sure that our chooks are healthy and robust," Mrs Stanton said.
"We also don't give our chooks any antibiotics or growth hormones or soy (as they market GM-free).
"That was another reason why we got into growing meat birds because we eat a lot of chicken at home and when we looked into how that chicken was raised, it made us question what we were feeding our children, and how it was grown.
"We have more confidence now our chickens will nourish their bodies.
"Plus the organic chicken manure has been great for our paddock health. The pasture growth following the chicken run has been phenomenal."
The Stantons also run 220 Angus cattle and crop 200 hectares of KI Oats and multi-species stock feed grains (wheat, lupins, peas, cereal rye, oats mix).
The break-up of the business also made us look at how we could intensify what we are growing on-farm.
- JENNY STANTON
They were once part of a larger family business, which was divided up following the 2019-20 bushfires.
The Stanton family business lost multiple properties in the fires on the evening of January 3, including 4000 sheep.
Will and Jenny nearly lost their Dalmore property, but were fortunate their house and sheds were saved. Sixty cattle and almost all of their fences and pasture still perished.
The couple now own about 815ha of arable country and are slowly rebuilding their herd.
"We are aiming to get to about 400 head of cattle," Mrs Stanton said.
"The break-up of the business also made us look at how we could intensify what we are growing on-farm."
Mrs Stanton said chicken farming has been a steep learning curve.
She had some knowledge from her time as an agronomist with KI Free Range Eggs, and the couple have also been taking advice from Val Ordway, former founder of Ordway's KI Poultry.
"But direct marketing has been one of the hardest parts to running the business," she said.
"It's not like just putting cattle on a truck and away they go, or just delivering your grain to the silo.
"You have the whole logistics chain to contend with, plus we farm on an island.
"We have marketing and online sales, collating those orders, abattoir bookings, Sealink bookings, accommodation, couriers from the processor at Kapunda, couriers to the Adelaide deliveries, picking up new chickens, labour - it has certainly been an eye opener."
But demand has been really strong and the Stantons have already doubled production to keep up.
Their first batch of 165 meat birds became available online in April last year and sold out immediately after one Facebook post.
"Then we kept selling out," Mrs Stanton said.
"So we doubled our numbers from batches of 200 to 400 a month."
Most of the birds are sold fresh on the island, but orders also come in from Adelaide and even as far as Melbourne.
"We are more expensive than the cheap, industrial, shed-raised chickens, but we go out of our way to create a high-value product," Mrs Stanton said.
The 400 Cobb500 birds are bought as day-olds from the mainland every four weeks.
They are brooded to two to three weeks old in the brooding nursery and then released gradually out into the paddocks to acclimatise.
They are on-farm for about eight weeks.
"Shed birds are processed after about 5-6 weeks, and will never see the sun or taste green grass. Instead, they are given medications called coccidiostats to stop them from falling sick in their confined lodgings and fed the cheapest feed ration possible under constant 24 hour a day lighting". Mrs Stanton said.
"Ours are feeding outside in nature, so we do get different growth rates from winter to summer.
"Our birds are quite big, and can dress out up to 3kg - we call these 'Churkeys'.
"But we have always had excellent feedback.
"People value high quality, the story behind the birds, our farm ethics, and are happy to pay a premium price."
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KI Primal Harvest charges about $31.50 for a 1.8-2.3kg bird. They also smoke some of their chicken breasts.
Mrs Stanton says it is hard competing with supermarkets and their $3.50/kg chickens, but their premium price-tag has to factor in the quality of the feed being fed to the chickens and their very high freight costs.
This recently-awarded state government grant "is very timely", she said.
"It's been a big year for us, organising our direct marketing, but we had also been looking into how to reduce the travel stress on our animals," she said.
"At the moment we are packing up every four weeks and heading to the mainland. Plus we have a young family.
"It seemed silly that we sell 80pc of our birds on the island, yet we spend so much time processing and distributing them on the mainland.
"So the grant was very timely as we were at a crossroads of what were we going to do."
Ms Stanton said they were still looking at options and quotes, but hoped to start building the facility "ASAP" and would look to hire at least a full-time equivalent.
She said they were fortunate that there were many ex-Ordway staff still on the island, while the ongoing nature of processing chickens meant the facility was not seasonal, unlike sheep and cattle.
"It means there is constant work all the time, making the facility even more important," she said.
The grant was part of a $1 million cash splurge by the state government on the island for "innovative recovery and resilience projects".
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