A handful of hope. Rare, slower-growing Sommerlad heritage-breed chicks, Grassland Poultry, NSW – a welcome and critical contribution to genetic diversity. In a monochromatic industry dominated by a single breed of white broiler meat chickens that are raised mostly in sheds, Grassland run a richly diverse breeding flock, hatching the eggs and pasture-raising birds for market. Read about the Sommerlad revolution here.

3.

It takes all sorts

The importance of diversity

If we understand that the ground on which we walk is simply the surface of a complex, pulsing subterranean world of communities of cooperating species, then we can understand that what lives above the ground must be equally rich, complex and diverse.

Herd of heritage-breed Berkshire Duroc pigs foraging in the scrub at Extraordinary Pork, NSW.

No matter how hard we try to banish diversity and impose strict monocultures, the knotty, escalating mess of interventions required to repress nature’s urge towards diversity is proof that nature won’t take no for an answer.

We push it down in one corner and it pops up in another. We rush over with our arsenal of interventions and blast the latest infraction to bits but, out of the corner of our eye, we see it rise up again elsewhere.

Antibiotic resistance is a case in point. For years, livestock producers have routinely administered prophylactic antibiotics to intensively raised livestock to prevent the inevitable outbreaks of disease that occur when you jam a lot of animals together in a small area for extended periods. It turned out that the antibiotics also accelerated growth, which was an added bonus. But over the past 15 years, there have been increasing indications that this practice may turn out to be a very unwise squandering of a precious tool for managing human diseases. As the scale and spread of intensive livestock farming escalates across the world, the levels of residual antibiotics now in the food chain has actually rendered some antibiotics largely ineffective for human treatment. Even more disturbingly, there is evidence now that species-specific diseases have evolved to withstand antibiotics — and presented with the opportunities generated by unnatural, intensive livestock production, they are starting to jump species (so-called ‘zoonotic’ infections). The idea that we can contain nature is simply wishful thinking.

When we started our butchery adventure, we were dimly aware of these wider concerns, but very clear about the importance of diversity. Grant was mystified by the narrow offering available in the world of meat. There was ‘lamb’ and ‘beef’ and ‘pork’ and ‘chicken’, but almost no differentiation by breed, or location or production method — no way to distinguish between one offering and another. Compared to the rich diversity in the world of wine, this seemed a bizarre anomaly. Why were grapes and the process of making them into wine valued so differently from the business of growing an animal and turning it into food? Where were all the different breeds, and why wasn’t anyone offering them? The more we learned about breeds, the more the world of meat opened up into a fascinating kaleidoscope of textures, shapes and flavours. We started to appreciate the importance of a broad genetic palette: different breeds suit different landscapes, different breeds produce different carcasses, different breeds provide a different table product, and so on.

Faster, bigger, cheaper

We also started to understand that, with a few exceptions, industrialised meat production is a monochromatic landscape featuring a small handful of breeds that have been honed for docility, maximum meat yield and fast growth. Without consumers even realising it, the many benefits of slower-growing animals have been traded off in favour of a handful of breeds that meet our collective addiction to the commercial imperative of faster, bigger, cheaper. Wherever you go, these breeds dominate, offering a bland but consistent and predictable consumer experience, and constraining the all-important need for genetic diversity. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with consistency and predictability. But if the short-term realisation of these attributes comes at the cost of long-term, sustainable health, resilience and flavour, then you’d have to wonder about the real value of the system and who is really benefitting from it.

In this system, sheep are often the nervy Merino cross — a dual-purpose by-product of the wool industry. Good, but not the first breed that you’d choose if you were looking for outstanding eating qualities. Cattle are increasingly big, black, fast-growing, American-style Angus that are finished on grain in feedlots and slaughtered at the age of 14–18 months, before any real flavour profile develops. Pigs are fast-growing, white-haired breeds such as Landrace, with long, lean bodies bred to yield more of the belly and loins that sell so well, and less of the fat that we’ve been taught to avoid over the past few decades.

‘We have a collective addiction to the commercial imperative of faster, bigger, cheaper.’

Meat chickens are uniformly the white Cobb or Ross breed — what the industry calls a ‘standard white broiler’, with a disproportionately large breast and remarkably fast-growing genetics: one of these birds raised in a shed can go from 5 grams when hatched to 2.2 kilograms in 35 days. That’s a super-efficient, short-term protein and money machine, never mind the long-term implications. Eggs come from prolific, brown, hybrid Hyline or ISA Brown chickens that have been bred to energetically pump out even, brown eggs for two years until their production declines, at which point, in the intensive system, they are sent off for pet food, or euthanised and composted. (Even pasture-based egg farmers who are happy to accommodate brief seasonal breaks in laying find that the economics of egg production mean that, when a chicken’s output drops off and they’re considered ‘spent’, they need to either be composted and recycled back into the farm or re-homed. At Extraordinary Pork, a pasture-based pig farm in New South Wales, spent laying hens from Farmer Brown, a pastured egg farm nearby, range across the paddocks with the heritage Berkshire pigs, fertilising the pastures and keeping the insect populations in balance. They are excellent pasture workers, and the intermittent eggs they lay are a welcome bonus for their owners and the pigs.)

The narrow focus on breeds selected exclusively for speed to market is particularly stark in the conventional dairy industry. Most of the commercial milk supply comes from black and white Holstein cows that have been narrowly bred with a ferocious commitment to increased production. Since 1950, the output per cow in the United States, for example, has risen five-fold, while in a similar period, industry consolidation has reduced the number of dairies by half. In commercial terms, this is a bonanza, and there’s no doubt that these ‘super cows’ are incredibly efficient milk machines: fewer cows, more milk, cheaper! But this genetic escalation in production capacity comes at a cost to the overall health of the cows, as well as a reduction in the quality and nutritional value of our dairy produce, and it also gives rise to the escalating problem of what to do with the male calves. The market price for 5-day-old male calves doesn’t justify the cost of freight and slaughter, but consumer appetite for veal has declined, so few farmers find it economical to grow male calves out. Increasingly, the economic and welfare costs of running a small dairy outweigh the returns, and the system seems to make everyone except the supermarkets and the end consumer pretty miserable.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The bucolic Burraduc Buffalo Farm is a model of ‘ecocentric’ over ‘egocentric’ farming, in which biodiversity and the collective health of all the creatures in the food chain, including predators, is prioritised.

Learning to share buffalo milk and live with dingoes

A buffalo dairy farm that challenges convention and insists on the right of all creatures to co-exist in the landscape.

At Burraduc, a regeneratively managed, coastal buffalo dairy farm in the Myall Lakes district of New South Wales, Elena and Andrei Swegen chose a dairy production model based on the radically different principle of sharing milk with their buffalo calves. The convention in the intensive dairy model dictates that the new-born calf stays with the cow long enough to receive the colostrum that is crucial for providing antibodies and healthy gut bacteria, after which the two are separated so that the cow can give all her milk to the farmer. By contrast, at Burraduc, the buffalo calves aren’t weaned until they are 5–6 months old. Each morning, the buffalo cows walk from the paddock through the on-farm dairy gate to be milked, after which they spend the day with their calves, feeding and ranging together across the paddocks. In the evening, they wander back to the dairy with the calves in tow and allow their babies to be separated and placed into a separate pen together while the cows return to spend the night in the paddocks. In the morning, the cows turn up again for milking and, after giving the farmer a share of their milk, they are reunited with their calves and wander the farm for the rest of the day. Male calves grow alongside their sisters until they begin to display sexual behaviour at around six to seven months, at which point they are sent off to the abattoir and become buffalo veal, which is consumed on the farm and sold to Burraduc customers.

It’s absolutely true that this system of sharing milk results in lower volumes of dairy products for sale and, if you’re producing less volume, then the market value of what you do sell must be high for the business to survive. Which, as always, brings us back to the question of how any one of us measures value — simply by price? Or should we be incorporating environmental, human and animal welfare impact and the nutritional value of a product into the shelf price?

However you choose to answer those questions, at Burraduc, the sharing model produces undeniably successful outcomes. The pastures are abundant, the calves are well-fed and healthy, the buffalo cows are content and living as naturally as possible, their milk is a rich expression of all the genetic and environmental goodness available on the farm and, in Elena’s skilful hands, it becomes award-winning cheese, passing all those minerals and vitamins — the concentrated health and vitality of the farm — to us.

Originally from Moscow, the Swegens are scientists who bred and farmed animals in various parts of Australia before finding the perfect location to grow their Riverine buffalo on the lush, sub-tropical, mid-northern coast of New South Wales. It’s an idyllic landscape abutting a national park and, even in winter and during drought, the paddocks are covered with lush grasses dotted with grand buffalo cows and limpid-eyed, wet-nosed calves.

At Burraduc, Central Asian Shepherd Dogs protect the buffalo calves and other domestic animals and discourage feral cats, foxes and local dingoes.

Elena Swegen with recently weaned calves — Riverine buffalo are wilder and less docile than domesticated cattle.

After morning milking, the cows are reunited with their calves to spend the day together wandering the pastures.

‘The Swegens believe in the importance of species diversity.’

In addition to running a radically different dairy model, the Swegens believe in the importance of species diversity and the right of all creatures to co-exist in the landscape.

Every ecosystem has its predator–prey and, when the system is in balance, each one of these creatures plays an important role in maintaining sustainable populations and preserving the overall health of the system. In Australia, the peak animal predator is the dingo, which for millennia has co-evolved with the landscape and other animals to keep the ecosystem in balance. But dingoes are hunters, so offer them a fenced paddock full of unprotected sheep with no instinctive capacity to protect themselves and the dingoes will, of course, do what comes naturally, much to the ire and distress of the sheep farmers. In response, farmers run aggressive campaigns, poisoning and shooting the dingoes in an attempt to eradicate them.

But, in the face of the increasing evidence that Australia’s native flora and fauna are in deep trouble from the combined impact of introduced species and loss of habitat from conventional agricultural practices, the Swegens argue for a more tolerant and nuanced response. Not only do dingoes have a right to inhabit the landscape as they did for thousands of years prior to the arrival of sheep farmers, but they also have a critical role to play in maintaining ecosystem balance. Additionally, they keep destructive introduced species like foxes, rabbits and feral cats in check. Feral cats, in particular, are much more savage hunters than dingoes and without a predator (like the dingo) to keep them in check, have played a huge part in wiping out many species of small marsupials and native birds.

At Burraduc, the Swegens refuse to shoot or poison dingoes or any other wild animals. Instead, they use Central Asian Shepherd Dogs to keep dingoes at bay and protect their domesticated animals, which include buffalo calves, a few sheep and chickens. As a result, although the farm borders the national park in which the dingoes live, and their neighbours report problems with wild dogs, the Swegens very rarely see dingoes. In addition, there are no destructive rabbits colonising and digging up the farm, and the kangaroos that compete with grazing livestock for available fodder in times of drought give the farm a wide berth.

Of course, it’s more work to choose to run a dairy farm this way. Buffalo are wilder than dairy cows and require careful husbandry, sharing the milk means more movement and handling of animals, and the livestock guardian dogs are another species to manage. But when the system sings, as it does at Burraduc, the overall benefits of this benign approach that fosters and embraces diversity ripple all the way from the farm to us, concentrated in each nutritious mouthful of yoghurt or buffalo cheese.

The natural urge towards diversity

The loss of species diversity in contemporary agriculture isn’t limited to livestock. The varieties of plant foods grown for human and animal consumption has narrowed dramatically since industrialisation and the advent of intensive agricultural practices.

As the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation reported in February 2019: ‘Of some 6000 plant species cultivated for food, fewer than 200 contribute substantially to global food output, and only nine account for 66 per cent of total crop production.’

Modern plant breeding and selection is all about logistics, shelf life and unhealthy ideas of perfection, rather than seasonality, flavour, nutrition and the role plants play in ensuring the health of complex ecosystems.

Of course, you could argue that this exclusive focus on breeds and systems that produce the greatest volumes isn’t entirely Machiavellian. By raising animals in sheds or feedlots, for example, you’re confining production to a limited area and, by selecting for specific genetic traits to get more yield from each animal or plant, you’re making the best use of resources. You’re getting more product, faster — and the volumes mean it’s cheaper for the consumer. That’s all got to be good, right? If only it were that simple.

Aside from the fact that this intensive production regime largely disregards the experience of animals and relegates them to slave status where their only function is to produce food for us, the gains in production yield are being made at the expense of diversity and ecosystem balance, which is not good for our long-term health and prosperity. The entrancing idea that we can pluck out any one species and hothouse it for our specific needs runs contrary to the laws of nature, which doggedly insist that the only viable, healthy systems are those comprising a rich network of diverse species.

The natural urge towards diversity is undeniable. If you look at the unkempt verges running along the sides of country roads or any garden that’s left to its own devices, you’ll see this at work. Different species appear, jostling together, vigorously collaborating and competing, and collectively creating a dynamic, networked ecosystem that together makes everything healthier and stronger — the sum is greater than the parts.

All living creatures cluster together in like communities, whether we’re microbes or humans, but all of us are also co-dependent for our health and wellbeing on all the millions of other creatures with which we interact every day. You only have to remember that your skin plays host to about 1000 different species of bacteria, fungi, viruses and mites to realise that there are critical, mutually beneficial interactions between life forms occurring everywhere, all the time. Everything we know about nature and evolution tells us that diversity produces capacity, and is critical to sustainable resilience and fertility. As soon as you narrow the palette too far, things start to go wrong, which is why human societies all over the world have always incorporated cultural rules that prevent in-breeding, maintain genetic diversity and keep our species evolving: stasis is the enemy of life. The battle for available resources determines the populations, variety and balance of different species within an ecosystem. The capacity to be flexible, to adapt and evolve — to diversify — is critical to survival.

But, as the spectacularly successful, dominant predator on earth, we humans increasingly seem to think that the resources on hand are infinite, that we’ve largely mastered nature, and that we’ll decide where, when and how we have our diversity, thanks very much.

Curiously, while our insatiable appetite for growth is actually crippling natural diversity at every turn, the notion of ‘diversity’ has become more and more popular and is increasingly understood as central to human cultural resilience and creativity. No company or organisation with a public profile would be seen dead these days without a diversity employment policy to trumpet about.

On the other hand, when it comes to agriculture and what we feed ourselves, we’re perfectly happy to drop diversity like a hot (Sebago) potato in favour of intensive monocultures that offer a narrowing long-term palette but huge short-term gains. Of course, the attraction of intensifying and concentrating production to gain huge advantages in speed and scale is overwhelmingly compelling, and it’s obvious why monocultural agricultural systems dominate the landscape and the aisles of our supermarkets. For the consumer, it’s all about convenience. For the producers, it’s about efficiency and scale. Grow one thing, as much as possible, as fast as possible, distribute to as many people as possible, pocket the profit. Repeat. It’s easy to see the appeal. But in the long term, this approach is an unsustainable hiding to nothing.

Land degradation — from excessive clearing, cultivation and grazing, and the damage caused by chemical inputs — has reduced the productivity of 23 per cent of the global land surface; each year, up to US$577 billion worth of global crops are at risk from pollinator loss, and 1 million of the 8 million animal and plant species in the world today are under threat of extinction. In May 2019, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services released the most comprehensive biodiversity report to date, which paints a sphincter-clenching picture of the current condition of the natural world and what will happen if we don’t change our behaviour — immediately and everywhere. Riddled with chilling statistics, the overriding message is that we urgently need to understand the connection between the damage our growth model is doing to the natural world, and to our own long-term survival.

We are, literally, eating the hand that feeds us.

Taking the long view

In our business, we’re very fortunate to work with the growing number of producers who are farming in a way that actively contributes to the long-term health, resilience, biodiversity and fertility of the land, and the communities it supports. Regenerative farming prioritises balance over yield and values nature’s superior ability to self-organise in pursuit of fertility. The farmer’s job is to find a way to meet their needs without compromising the dynamic interaction between every creature in the ecosystem. In fact, whatever it is that the farmer is growing — plants or animals — the process must contribute to the overall health and diversity rather than compromise or deplete the system. In recent years, we’ve seen a welcome increase in the consumer appetite for diversity in crops and livestock, enabling willing farmers to be more adventurous and explore different breeds and strains. Over the years we’ve welcomed dozens of different breeds of animals into our butchery, some of which are critically endangered and provide a powerful link to our agricultural past. As counter-intuitive as it might sound, if we don’t keep eating these rare breeds, they won’t survive because no one will grow them.

We’ve met all sorts of breeders and chicken fanciers and passionate fourth-generation farmers looking for breeds to help them tread more lightly on the earth and farm in a different way to their forebears — feeding the land that feeds us. We became obsessed with the glorious aesthetics of different breeds of pigs and chickens and fantasised about smuggling them into our suburban backyard in Sydney. (We did have some success hosting Brian and Sheila, a devastatingly beautiful pair of heritage-breed Belgian Campine chickens. But, not long after he arrived in our Marrickville garden, young Brian discovered his voice. Despite his firm belief that he was the Pavarotti of the chicken world, Brian’s proud and earnest crowing, which he started practising at 3 a.m. each morning, was a uniquely horrible, blood-curdling scream that sounded like a woman being murdered. After an outcry from the neighbours, we were compelled to pack him off to the country where we sadly later learned that not-so-fantastic Mr Fox got the better of him. Sheila remained, ruling the remaining Orpington Splash and Belgian Wyandotte chooks with her more moderate shriek, delivered during regular working hours, for the next decade.)

‘If we don’t keep eating these rare breeds, they won’t survive.’

Every piece of meat we sell is identified by breed, and there is a gorgeous spectrum of diversity across the different farms. Some of the cattle include Red Angus, Galloway and Belted Galloway, Dexter, Wagyu, Hereford, Speckle Park and South Devon. Sheep include Southdown, Black and White Suffolk, Hampshire Down, Dorper, Texel, Australian White, Wiltshire Horn and Wiltipoll. Pigs include Berkshire, English Large Black, English Large White, Duroc, Tamworth and Wessex Saddleback. Among the meat chickens are Transylvanian Naked Necks, Indian Game, Plymouth Rock, Light Sussex and Aussie Game, while the ducks include Aylesbury, Pekin and Muscovy.

The farmers we work with are intent on either differentiating by brand, or value-adding as a way of thriving in a contracting industry.

Like all farmers, regenerative livestock farmers select the breeds they grow with great care, considering every facet of production from meat quality to genetic vitality and the fit with their particular production system. But, because the overall objectives and goals differ from those of conventional or intensive farmers, the end products are also very different.

If you’re a farmer wanting to build a thriving ecosystem and produce the best-quality table produce from free-ranging animals raised outside on pasture, then you’re looking for a very particular set of genetics that may not have much in common with those favoured by the intensive industry. White-skinned pigs, for example, are more vulnerable to sunburn and skin cancers so, if you’re raising them outside in a country like Australia, you’d better be sure they’ve got plenty of shade and shelter. Instead, you might consider old-breed, black or multi-hued pigs that are hardy and instinctively know how to thrive outside in the elements, developing a layer of protective, delicious fat and providing flavoursome meat. On the other hand, if the meat is ‘too’ fatty, then consumers who have been encouraged over the past 30 years to view animal fats with deep suspicion might arc up and refuse to buy.

More mature, slower-growing animals generally offer the best texture and the deepest flavour. The difference between yearling beef (12–18 months) and 2–3-year-old pasture-raised beef, for example, is incomparable, and a growing number of consumers are cottoning on and seeking out more mature, better-quality, ethically raised meat. However, animals fattened in feedlots grow faster than those living their entire lives grazing freely on pasture. So despite the benefits that come with maturity and slow growth, every farm is a business, and the longer an animal is on pasture and the longer it takes to reach a marketable size, the more it costs. In a marketplace that prioritises speed and volume, it can be hard for a farmer or a butcher to earn a price that rewards the cost, time and work involved in producing a superior product with a beneficial environmental footprint.

When we first started our pursuit of different breeds of livestock, we found a small but growing number of farmers who were pasture-raising heritage meat breeds for commercial sale. It wasn’t long before we were able to offer our customers half a dozen different sheep and cattle breeds, and a smaller number of heritage pig breeds. But we were stymied when it came to chicken. It took six years of searching high and low to find an option to the omnipresent white broiler bird — and another couple of years before it became a viable commercial product.

Born to be bland: the broiler chicken industry

Unless you’ve hunted down a heritage breed, every time you eat chicken, the chances are you are eating a white Cobb or Ross breed, which are so similar as to be interchangeable. They are the ‘standard white broiler’ that has been fine-tuned over the past 50 years to provide an irresistibly efficient meat bird that satisfies all the material requirements of our current market system. A bird that’s been engineered to grow muscle before bone, and produces a high meat yield — mostly breast — very fast. A chicken living inside a temperature-controlled, aritfically lit shed with all its food and water laid on doesn’t need to spend energy learning to negotiate the elements while keeping an eye out for predators, foraging for food or growing powerful legs and a strong skeleton to support itself. Instead, safe and sedentary inside the asylum, with nothing else to do, the chicken tucks in and puts on weight, very quickly.

It’s hard to see how even a flock animal could enjoy living cheek by jowl with hundreds of other birds without enough room to spread its wings, or do the things that chickens do when they’re free to roam around outside. Putting aside the question of whether this is a humane or fair way to treat a fellow animal, raising chickens in sheds appears to be a super-efficient way to convert a relatively small resource expenditure into a hugely popular source of protein. Except, of course, there’s always a price when you cut corners to speed something up. In the case of intensively raised chickens (and pigs), there’s a cascading avalanche of issues including safe waste disposal that doesn’t pollute the natural environment, prophylactic antibiotic use to counteract the constant threat of disease and the drastic narrowing of the gene pool. Not surprisingly, intensively raised white broiler chicken meat is a singularly bland, inoffensive product that requires a lot of dressing up to achieve genuine flavour. A very limited life results in a very limited product.

The riotous success of the intensive white broiler chicken industry has dramatically reduced both the cost of chicken and our expectation of what it should taste like. What has increased, however, is how often we expect to eat it, and our perplexing willingness to turn a blind eye to the way this meat is produced.

Over the years, during our search for the elusive option to the white broiler chicken, we’ve worked with farmers who are successfully pasture-raising these Cobb or Ross broiler birds. Given the opportunity, the birds’ nascent instincts start to come to the fore. They graze and scratch and sunbake and dust-bathe and their growth rates slow as they spend energy dealing with the Great Outdoors. Also, while they’re pottering around outside on pasture, they’re providing fertiliser, gently disturbing the soil surface and assisting plant regrowth, eating plants and insects, and fulfilling their role as predators in the ecological food chain. However, while the pastured method is vastly preferable from every perspective, the Cobb or Ross broiler is constrained by its super-fast growing genetics, and becomes less active as it gains weight.

Australian meat chicken production is an unnatural monoculture and it took us eight years to find a commercial meat chicken breed other than the ubiquitous standard white broiler. But in 2014, a shaft of light pierced the avian gloom and we discovered Michael and Kathryn Sommerlad and their heritage chicken breeding project.

A chicken revolution

Meet the Sommerlad chicken, a unique composite bird that includes up to seven different breeds in its genetic makeup.

Slower-growing, athletic and selectively bred over 15 years to thrive outside in the Australian climate, Sommerlad chickens happily manage the full spectrum of extreme summer heat and mid-winter cold with resilient equanimity.

Unlike the white broiler chickens that struggle to remain agile after 8 weeks of age, let alone cross the road, Sommerlad birds are a riot of colour and are built to run, hunt and explore with long, strong legs and powerful feet. After hatching, the downy chicks spend 2–3 weeks in the brooder growing protective feathers, before spending the next 9–12 weeks outside on pasture.

By contrast, the majority of white broiler chickens are bred and hatched at facilities owned by the small handful of vertically integrated poultry producers that dominate the industry. The day-old chicks are then distributed to hundreds of farms where they grow, mostly in sheds, until they reach market weight. It’s extremely rare for chicken farmers to breed and hatch their own birds.

Michael Sommerlad, the chicken expert and breeder responsible for the eponymous bird, was spurred into action by the experience of spending years in the meat-chicken industry managing ‘standard broiler’ birds with most of the ‘chicken-ness’ bred out of them. In the 1990s, the white broiler took over completely, and producers sold off all other strains of meat chickens to concentrate production on this single breed.

Concerned about the loss of genetics (and knowledge), Michael purchased some of the birds that were suddenly homeless and continued to breed and foster these strains. Convinced that Australians would embrace a better alternative if they experienced it, Michael and Kathryn Sommerlad set about producing a slow-growing, flavoursome table bird. As they write, the Sommerlad bird is:

… specifically bred to thrive in free-range, pasture-rearing environments. Because of this careful breeding, our chickens have a range of higher-welfare characteristics. These include active foraging behaviour, heat-resistance, balanced body confirmation and strong legs, as well as good liveability with improved, natural resistance to diseases endemic to Australian poultry flocks.

Sommerlad chickens are also remarkably animated in ways you don’t see in standard white broiler birds. Adam and Fiona Walmsley grew Sommerlads for us a few years ago at their beautiful Buena Vista Farm near Kiama in New South Wales, and Adam had some very funny footage of Sommerlad chicks jumping up and swinging on a loose loop of the water-dripper inside the brooder. One swings and then another jumps up and knocks the swinger off so it can have a go, before being knocked off by the next one who thinks it must be their turn now. They were only two weeks old, and not yet feathered enough to go out onto pasture, but already displaying the curiosity, personality and resourcefulness that allows them to thrive outside.

Farmer and breeder Kim Kiss and Roger the Magnificent, the elder statesman of the Sommerlad heritage breeding flock at Grassland Poultry.

Sommerlad chick in the brooder, about 1 week old, at Grassland Poultry, NSW.

99 per cent of Australian chickens are white broiler chickens. Grassland Poultry is one of a handful of farms growing a variety of chicken breeds that provide a welcome splash of colour and genetic diversity.

Three different expressions of Sommerlad genetics, Grassland Poultry, NSW.

As well as delivering a multi-award-winning table bird with darker, deeply flavoured meat, thicker skin and golden fat, there’s the skill it takes to breed and cross multiple generations of different breeding flocks to maximise the most desirable qualities to produce birds that are, literally, made for Australian pastures. It’s one thing to grow some heritage-breed chickens; it’s another thing altogether to breed new strains of chickens that can be reproduced consistently and at some scale in pasture-based production.

Then there are the handful of carefully selected, family-run farms that are breeding and raising the birds according to specific Sommerlad guidelines. Each farm is unique, but all are united by a profound commitment to diversity, and all are passionate, skilful trailblazers in small-scale, regenerative farming. Whether you eat meat or not, in our humble opinion the whole country owes a debt of gratitude to the Sommerlads for their remarkable work in reintroducing critical genetic diversity to the meat chicken industry, and to the small group of farmers with the courage and imagination to embrace the Sommerlad bird.

The Sommerlad chickens we sell are from Grassland Poultry and are bred and raised by Kim and Bryan Kiss in New South Wales. The Kisses embraced regenerative farming about 20 years ago, and have been cell grazing their beef cattle and working to rebuild soil health for years. They had been pasture-raising white broiler chickens, rotating the chickens across the paddocks after their cattle, and using Italian Maremma sheepdogs to protect the birds. But when they heard about the Sommerlad project, they immediately set about joining the small group of accredited Sommerlad farmers. At the time of writing, the Kisses have just completed construction of a small, on-farm chicken abattoir. This is a remarkable and rare achievement for a small-scale, regenerative farm and will allow them to control the entire production cycle from breeding and hatching through to slaughter, packaging and dispatch.

Changing behaviour, rethinking our assumptions of market value and weaning ourselves off the unsustainable monocultural food production treadmill is difficult. It means choosing to become more informed and accepting responsibility for our role in deciding what gets produced — and resisting the guilty, narcotic lure of impossibly cheap products. Cheap now, devastatingly expensive later.

If you think of your own gut biome as an ecosystem comprising communities of diverse flora that require equally diverse and healthy inputs to thrive, you can see how the idea of a diverse diet rich in many different kinds of vegetables, fruits and animal proteins might also enrich your individual, overall health. You might conclude that the notion of meat as the main source of protein and the hero of every meal narrows your options, and this revelation might send you scampering off to explore the banquet of seasonal plant possibilities at your local farmers’ market. As long as you’re holding the growers of those fruits and vegetables to account and ensuring that you spend your hard-earned cash on food that’s produced out of systems that are transparent, traceable and build long-term fertility, then that’s a very good thing.

But don’t forget, whether you eat animals or not, unless we all support the work of farmers who are actively working to build biodiversity by farming regeneratively and choosing to grow a diverse range of livestock breeds, then we may find that those breeds disappear — and the entire global ecosystem will be poorer for the loss.