When Mathilde Godard signed a 15-year contract with poultry producer Duc to supply the company with organic chickens from her family farm in the village of Neuilly, in the département (county) of the Yonne, in northern Burgundy, she was fullly confident in the future of the partnership.
Several other local poultry farmers had also signed up with Duc, one of France’s biggest poultry meat producers, which has its headquarters and slaughterhouse in the village of Chailley, also in the Yonne.
Godard, who comes from a farming family, set up her business in 2012, when organic poultry farming was in full expansion. She gained authorisation for her project from the local chamber of agriculture, and borrowed 300,000 euros from the bank to fund the building on the family farm of two poultry houses, each surrounded by 2 hectares of land, to raise around 9,000 chickens, complying with the free-range requirements for organic poultry farming.
But she soon ran into problems. The costs of managing the farm were higher than the young woman had anticipated, and Godard was unable to make any proper income from it. She tried to re-negotiate the terms of her contract with Duc, but in vain. “We were made to understand that the problem came from us,” she recalled.
However, she persisted for seven years until, at the beginning of 2020, just as she was taking delivery of new chicks, Duc, which had been bought up three years earlier by Dutch group Plukon, announced it was halting its production of organic poultry meat. However, the company required her to see out the eight years remaining on the 15-year contract by raising standard, non-organically farmed chickens. While they were to remain free-range, their feed would be conventional and not organic, and they would be sent for slaughter after a lifespan of 40 to 42 days, instead of the previous 81.
“That was not my project,” she told Mediapart. “It made no sense with the spreading of manure [from the chickens] over the organic cultivations of the farm. I therefore refused the new delivery of chicks.” The following months were spent trying to develop a new project and market, while still having to pay off her bank loan. She eventually reconverted her business into the raising, still under organic certification, of hens for egg production.
After running into serious financial difficulties in 2016, Duc, which became France’s second-largest poultry meat producer after its creation in 1990, was bought up in 2017 by Dutch corporation Plukon Food Group, one of Europe’s leading poultry meat producers. That was followed by the introduction of a 20-million-euro “modernisation” plan.
Production was to be limited strictly to standard industrial poultry farming, with all that is detrimental from an environmental, nutritional and health perspective. There was to be no further organic poultry production, nor that of “certified” chickens (a designation that means the birds have been raised to slightly higher standards, including a longer lifespan and healthier feed, than industrial methods), and which were a particularity of Duc’s produce.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
This example of the concentration and industrialisation of poultry farming in the Yonne and neighbouring départements, and with it the loss of higher standards of rearing which contribute to both animal welfare and the economic stability of farmers, mirrors the situation elsewhere in France and Europe, the result of the economic strategies of agroindustry giants and imposed in an often opaque manner, as revealed in this joint investigation by Mediapart and its partners in the European journalistic collective Lighthouse Reports.
After the Plukon group bought up Duc, the decision to end organic production was taken from almost one day to the next and without consultation with the farmers concerned. In the Yonne, around a dozen farmers, like Mathilde Godard, were affected. “Not all of them managed to bounce back like her,” said Jean-Bertrand Brunet, spokesman for the Yonne branch of the Confédération Paysanne, a left-leaning French farmers’ union. “Most of them took up standard poultry [production] and had to invest in adapting their coops to the new requirements demanded by Duc. It’s a problem: the farmers are submitted to decisions about which they have no say.”
One poultry farmer, speaking on condition his name was withheld, told Mediapart how, in 2016, he had begun to prepare with Duc a project to raise free-range chickens but that, at the last minute, Duc decided the business would be for chickens farmed under standard industrial conditions. “I accepted because poultry farming allows me to produce manure for my cereal and beetroot crops which are still dependent upon chemical products,” he said. “But I would never eat that type of chicken! We have our own hens on the farm, who are raised free-range and have a healthy diet.”
Other farmers who had for years raised chickens to “certified” standards found themselves obliged to adapt to industrial, fast-growth methods, with a concentration of 22 birds per square metre. “In the end we succeeded in negotiating something that was a half-way house, [with] chickens slaughtered after 48 days, [and] with a density of 15 chickens per square metre,” said one of them, under contract with Duc, who agreed to speak to Mediapart also on condition that his name was withheld. “But our chickens don’t fetch a higher price, and the majority of farmers didn’t manage to negotiate like us. It’s regrettable. There were positive evolutions, coherent with societal expectations. And we’re now in the process of moving backwards.”
A vast plan emerged to double the capacity of the Duc slaughterhouse in Chailley, whose capacity had already been increased two-fold in 2017. The project was typical of those which characterised the expansion of industrial agricultural techniques in the 1970s and 1980s, as if in between times climate change, the damage caused by intensive agriculture, with the contamination of soils and rivers by nitrates, and considerations of animal welfare had not become major issues of public concern.
The expansion of the slaughterhouse will see its production increase from the current daily intake of 227 tonnes of birds to 400 tonnes – equating to the daily slaughter of 265,000 chickens, which are to be delivered by 113 truckloads per day. To meet that figure, 80 new giant poultry-rearing sites – called broiler houses – are to be built within a 150-kilometre range of Chailley, on top of the existing 120 poultry farms already operating under contract with Duc. Within that geographical circle are eight départements: the Yonne, the Aube, the Cote d’Or, the Marne and Haute-Marne, the Ardennes, the Seine-et-Marne and the Loiret.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The new poultry site buildings will house the maximum number of chickens that can be fattened up in one broiler house, using a system of artificial ventilation. With a concentration of 22 chickens per square metre in the new hangars, those with a surface area of 1,340 square metres can house 28,900 birds, while the larger buildings of 1,800 square metres can house 39,600 birds. Those capacities are not rounded figures for good reason; under French law, plans for broiler houses containing more than 30,000 chickens must first be approved by a process of public consultation, while those for hangars of more than 40,000 birds must be approved by an official environmental impact assessment and a process of public consultation.
Each of the new giant broiler houses will follow the same production criteria; the chicks are all of the same genetic origin – the fast-growing Ross 308 variety – and are submitted to the same feed rations. They are raised under artificial lighting and are slaughtered after 40-42 days, after which, for sanitary purposes, the space they occupied remains empty for a period of around ten days before a new batch of chicks arrive. In total, there are seven such rotations per year, representing a production of between 209,300 and 277,200 broilers according to the size of the broiler house. That does not include those which die during rearing, and which, according to sources, typically amount to between 2% and 4% of the initial numbers.
The expansion project has been discretely developed, with no details provided in public to the villages neighbouring the new sites, and with no studies on the environmental consequences to the départements concerned. It is only when applications for construction permits are filed that some villagers discover the plans to build giant broiler houses nearby. Occasionally, the preparations have been reported in the local press, and in trade magazines which vaunt Duc’s new production model.
Duc did not respond to Mediapart’s requests for comment (see the ‘Boîte Noire’ section bottom of page).
In this region where intensive rearing already exists, but which retains vast preserved areas of countryside, many among the local population fear the arrival of a model that resembles the intensive animal farms in Brittany, in north-west France, notorious for the consequences of their effluents which have irreversibly polluted water tables. Moreover, while the broiler houses require considerable amounts of water, the water sources of the Yonne département have regularly been diminished by droughts over recent years.
Mediapart has obtained details of the progress of Duc’s industrial expansion plan. Since 2017 in the Yonne and Aube départements, five sites have, variously, either been established or are on the point of being established, while two others have been suspended due to local opposition. Meanwhile, Plukon is continuing with its quest for business partner candidates to reach its goal of opening 80 giant broiler houses, and notably in the Marne where it began active prospecting at the end of last year.
Over the past year in the Marne and Ardennes départements, six giant broiler houses have been developed, or are in the process of development, under contract with feed producer De Heus, which reportedly owns a 40% stake in Plukon. One of these will house up to 257,600 birds at any one time, representing an annual production of 1.8 million, and which will for a large part be slaughtered by Duc at Chailley. The others are to be taken across the border to Belgium, to slaughterhouses owned by Plukon at Mouscron and Maasmechelen.
In the north and east of the Loiret département are around ten poultry farms under contract with French company Sanders, which provides the chicks and their feed, while the grown birds are subsequently slaughtered by Duc at Chailley. Similarly, in the south of the Ardennes are new poultry farms established by Sanders which send their chickens for slaughter at Chailley.
Duc’s new broiler houses are all gigantic metallic structures, with adjoining grain fodder silos, situated on the edges of villages. While they respect the minimum legal distance of 100 metres from the nearest habitations, they are never far from homes. The smells from the broiler houses, and notably those that emanate when they are cleaned, circulate in the neighbourhood, while they also raise noise levels from both the heavy trucks serving the plants, and from the ventilators that sometimes operate around the clock.
There have been incidents when locals opposed to the projects are submitted to pressure from Duc or its partners, and which in some communities has established a climate of fear.
In the tiny village of Saint-Brancher, in the south of the Yonne département, close to the town of Avallon, the local mayoress, Joëlle Guyard, came under pressure over a project to build a broiler house with a capacity of 39,600 chickens and which had met with strong local opposition. The project necessitated a change to the local urban planning regulations (which in French go by the acronym PLUI), for these stipulated that two plots of land on which the broiler house would be built were unsuitable for development.
“We’re in the Morvan regional natural park,” said Guyard, referring to the protected hilly massif of the Morvan in which the village is situated. “We have a charter that advocates the ‘non-dependence’ on the globalised economy, and according to which: ‘Industrial rearing projects do not correspond with the sustainable wish to maintain a balance between the natural environments, landscapes and resources of the Morvan’. Which is why the municipal council is opposed to a modification of the PLUI, which was required for this poultry farm project.”
The mayoress told Mediapart that Duc attempted to influence her in no uncertain terms. “At times I am afraid, I don’t sleep peacefully. Standing opposite, they are not tender types,” she said of Duc. “[…] the Duc representative told me that I was going about things any old way, that we were in the wrong, that the prefect [local state representative] would intervene and have the last word, that even if I opposed the project, my decision would not be recognised […] If the municipal council doesn’t validate the project, he told me, Duc and its shareholders would trigger ‘Plan B’.”
Contacted by Mediapart, the individual in question neither confirmed nor denied Guyard’s account (see the Boîte Noir’ section, bottom of page).
Enlargement : Illustration 4
Behind the broiler house project is Didier Couhault, a cattle farmer who wanted to place his son as manager of the new poultry business. “We might take things to the administrative tribunal, if not we’ll look for another terrain,” told Mediapart. “Whatever, this project will happen.”
Couhault hardly expects to make riches from the new activity. “We’re workers with no fixed income,” he said. “With the new Ross breeds, it’s a chicken that swells up, grows on its own, but it’s also a chicken that’s more fragile and requires more attention. Everything is set out down to the last detail, we have no margin for error.” He cited the example of a poultry farm in a neighbouring village, where chickens in one batch for slaughter weighed less than the expected 2.5 kilos, because of a weekend when the farmer had not seen that the hatch on a feed pipe was blocked. “With those chickens, if something is missing [for just] one day from the rations it’ll have a direct effect on the weight of the chicken at the end.” Duc remunerates its suppliers according to the weight of the chickens per square metre, at a minimum 9.18 euros per square metre if all is well.
But Couhault is undeterred. Beef prices are falling, and he believes the future is in poultry. Moreover, for several years now, the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) provides subsidies for industrial poultry production. While the giant broiler house requires an investment of 500,000 euros, the CAP would hand out 40,000 euros, and Duc would give the same amount.
About 80 kilometres north-east of Saint-Brancher lies Villiers-le-Bois, a small village in the Aube département with a population of little more than 100. In the spring of 2021, Plukon and its French subsidiary Duc invited a number of farmers to view their new, 100-metre-long broiler house project, hoping to encourage them to join the production network. The plan for the plant was only discovered locally when the planning permission was displayed during the construction work, which began in June 2020.
Enlargement : Illustration 5
“Seeing that, we called for a public meeting with the farmer and the industrialist,” recalled Christine Gheza who, from her garden, has a clear view of the plant which lies about 200 metres from her home. The meeting was attended by the militant French animal welfare and protection association L214. “The result [of the association’s presence] was that there were five gendarmerie brigades present that day, and people were stopped for roadside checks. You’d have thought that we were in the middle of a terrorist situation! All that to say that there was no proper discussion.”
In any case, the public meeting came too late for the project’s opponents. The village mayor had given his approval for the planning permission to build the plant, and an appeal lodged by Gheza against the construction permit was rejected. The giant broiler house has since been built. “The first delivery of chicks arrived in March 2021,” Gheza told Mediapart, referring to detailed written notes she kept. “On April 9th [2021], the trucks came to take the chickens to the slaughterhouse. Then, after a few days of sanitary isolation, a second batch arrived. They were taken away on May 25th, and June 1st. We’re now into the seventh batch; it entered on January 25th [2022].”
Gheza observed that the collection of the grown chickens is carried out in two waves. The first is after their pre-planned lifespan of between 40-42 days. According to information from several poultry farmers, in Duc’s broiler houses around 4,000 chickens are prematurely selected for slaughter at the end of a lifespan of about 35 days. For Duc, that is a way of maximising its production, by giving the remaining chickens more space to fatten-up for a further week.
Gheza also recorded the number of trucks coming and going to the plant. “For the second collection, there were four articulated trucks that succeeded each other,” she said. “It happens very early in the morning, [and] in the winter it’s still dark. I counted 22 crates per truck. According to my calculations, in each crate are 330 chickens.”
In the architectural plans for the giant broiler house, which Mediapart obtained access to, it is noted that the loading of chickens into the trucks would be handled by “road vehicles of the 44-tonne articulated-truck type”. For deliveries of feed, “a vehicle of the same type” was to be used to supply silos with feed every week”. It was also planned that the broiler house would be surrounded by “coloured” and “uneven” hedges to improve the visual aspect of the plant, but which today remain absent.
Still within the Aube, in the village of Droupt-Saint-Basle, a new broiler house has been operating since the end of 2017. That same year, a farmer in the village of Ville-sur-Arce, further south, also joined the network and he currently plans to build a third broiler house. Meanwhile, in the Yonne département, in the village of Courson-les-Carrières, about 25 kilometres south of the town of Auxerre, a new broiler house with a capacity of 29,700 birds is due to open in the coming days.
Numerous poultry farmers approached by Mediapart declined to be interviewed and advised that questions should be addressed directly to Duc. But the company’s management, including its development director, declined to offer any comment (see ‘Boîte Noire’, bottom of page).
However, Benoît Chatelain, a poultry farmer based in the Yonne village of Saint-Léger-Vauban, in the Morvan region, did agree speak to Mediapart. He planned to build a broiler house with a capacity for 39,600 birds, to be erected beside another already in existence and which would bring the total number of chickens raised on his family farm to 60,000. That meant that his project had to be submitted to an environmental impact assessment. When Mediapart met him at the end of January, his project had just been approved by the Yonne prefecture (the local state administration centre).
“There's a lot of talk about animal welfare, but when will there be talk of human welfare?” he asked. “We need to increase our revenue, it falls with every year, and the broiler houses allow us to produce manure which serves as fertilizer for our land. With that, we’ll be less dependent on chemical products.” Currently, Chatelain uses about 20 tonnes of chemical-based fertilisers on his farm per year. With his new broiler house, he expects to collect from it a yearly total of 300-350 tonnes of manure.
On paper, the manuring from chicken waste appears to be a more environmentally friendly process. But there is a financial cost: Mediapart understands that when the chickens are fully grown, they are sold by the farmers to Duc for 40 (euro) centimes per piece, which equates to around 16 centimes per kilo. In supermarkets, Mediapart observed, the price of chicken meat that had been prepared at Duc’s slaughterhouse in Chailley, and stamped with the phrase declaring “Respect for animal welfare”, was selling at between 4.3 euros per kilo for legs and 14.3 euros per kilo for fillets.
Enlargement : Illustration 6
“For sure, Duc earns a bit more money, but for us integrating [Duc’s production network] brings us security,” said Chatelain. In the system which he has “integrated”, Duc provides the chicks and poultry feed and, once the birds have fattened up to the right weight, looks after collecting them, slaughtering them and preparing meat cuts, and selling them on to retailers. The industrialists and the supermarkets take the largest slice of profits.
The role of the poultry farmers in the system is limited to rearing the birds, and they have no margin for manoeuvre in the choice of products they use nor on the pricing of their production. They must pay the bank loans contracted for the building of the broiler houses, and the heavy costs of gas and electricity consumption – the birds are kept under artificial light and intensive heat to encourage their growth, while ventilation systems are employed to avoid them asphyxiating.
In Neuvy-Sautour, a village about ten kilometres south-east of Chailley with a population of 930, locals successfully opposed a project to build a broiler house, when environmental concerns were joined by issues of conflicts of interest. The project, for a building with a capacity of housing 39,600 chickens, was led by the son-in-law of the mayor, upon whose land the manure produced was to be spread. The mayor, without consultation, issued planning permission. Local opponents of the project contacted the media to expose the affair and at the end of January the local council duly annulled the planning permission.
But beyond this second and momentary setback for Duc, the industrialist continues its prospections in the countryside of the Yonne, the Aube and the Marne départements and beyond, in the north-east Ardennes. While looking for appropriate sites for broiler houses, it presents farmers, who are often struggling to make a living, with assurances of its technological prowess in the production of what the profession calls “meat chickens”, while highlighting the added bonus of manure production.
French public funds for the Chailley slaughterhouse
It apparently does so with the benediction of the state. Of all the several requests for environmental authorisation for the building of broiler houses seen by Mediapart, not one, to date, was opposed by the local prefect. As for the extension of the slaughterhouse in Chailley, the construction work will benefit from a state subsidy of 395,000 euros as part of the French government’s economic stimulation plan, called “France Relance”, launched in 2020.
Officially, the “France Relance” funds given to the slaughterhouse extension was made on the grounds that it would “improve animal protection, workplace health and safety” and “reinforce competitivity”, and also “participate in maintaining employment through the modernisation of slaughterhouse tooling”. Since the creation of Duc in 1990 by businessman Gérard Bourgoin, who was born in Chailley and served as its mayor for 31 years until 2014, the slaughterhouse has benefitted from several state handouts to keep it afloat.
However, for the time being the plan to extend the building is the subject of an environmental impact assessment, and which was submitted in recent weeks to a public enquiry. But that concerns only the activity of the slaughterhouse and the study does not concern the building of the 80 broiler houses that it would serve. Nor does the study consider the question of increased greenhouse gas emissions that would be caused in parallel to the increase in slaughterhouse activity – truck deliveries and collections would be doubled by the extension over the coming years. It remains to be seen whether the prefecture of the Yonne (representing the state) will authorise a project that appears to be from a bygone time.
“The Netherlands is now submitted to stricter standards, while Plukon comes to carry out its dirty stuff in our place,” commented Catherine Schmitt, president of the association Yonne Nature Environnement. “But these rearing farms are enough to put you off chicken. The first job in the morning for poultry farmers consists of picking up the carcasses.”
Spread over dozens of individual farms and located across several départements and three regions, the Plukon model advances, hidden, and offers no guarantees to those dependent upon it. For what if, from one day to the next, the Dutch group decided to reorientate its activities, in the same manner that it suddenly halted its organic production? Might it decide that quality chicken farming is more profitable than the standard, industrially produced birds? If such a choice was made, there is the question of the bank loans taken out by the farmers, and the future of the giant, hermetic broiler houses designed for just one type of production, which are incompatible with free-range or organic poultry farming. In that scenario, many people could find themselves penniless.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.