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Ed Lanning

Ed Lanning

Farm manager at Devonshire Poultry Limited; runs a 152,000-bird indoor broiler farm in Wiltshire, UK; second-generation poultry producer shortlisted for Young Farmer of the Year.

Jul 15, 2026

31:33
And so Oakstone Farm, tell us more about going to a bit of the detail of what you've done since you've been back to sort of upgrade it and get it to where it is today.
31:42
Well, to start with sort of with the sheds and the performance, we put LED lights into two of the sheds, which didn't have them.
31:50
One of the sheds has got the Signify Nature Dynamic lights in, which creates a jungle light for the chicken to recreate light like it would be more on the jungle floor, as chicken is naturally a jungle fowl living on the floor of the rainforest.
32:04
So that's been a really good trial to do.
32:07
Put new drinkers into two of the sheds under the government regulations.
32:10
investment scheme, new water sanitising system, new water pumps, and just spending a lot of time in the sheds with the smoke machine, understanding the quirks of these sheds because they're 100 foot wide, they're abnormally wide for broiler sheds, understanding the quirks of them and just spending the time in there to get it right.
32:35
And that's the biggest time and effort was the biggest investment really to get the sheds performing.
35:35
Would you agree? And what do you think could be done to encourage more fresh talent into your sector?
7:18
So, yeah, who wants to kick us off? You know, if you were walking back through the gates in 2035, how do you think it might differ to today?
7:31
Well, I think there's To look at what your farm will look like, you've got to look at the bigger picture.
7:38
You've got to look at sort of what's happening in Europe because European poultry production very much still affects what we do in the UK.
7:48
We've dropped to 30 kilos a square metre in the UK, which has created a shortage of chicken.
7:56
So the UK imports have gone up and planning commission in the UK has as um we all know is very difficult very difficult to get which is allowing room for imported chicken to get a foothold um i think the biggest thing is a young farmer looking forward we have to be careful of it's that when the war in ukraine ends at some point um There's a lot of labour over there.
8:24
There's a lot of land.
8:25
There's all the space for grain to be grown over there, as we all know.

24 MINS LATER

32:43
They'd rather go out of their way to pick those eggs up because they, like to know where their food comes from and i think there's certainly an element there for people wanting to do it um but to this a scale thing i don't know how how we can get the message across to to the general public to understand what farming is and how to better understand it really which i think there definitely should be should be something there

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