MY expectations on a visit to Nichols Poultry farm did not include being struck by the beauty of the place. Raising chickens and turkeys, I knew, was done indoors in sheds and smelled less than delightful, so a 133ha spread of rolling, rural good looks was a surprise.
A breeze was rippling 50ha paddocks of triticale, a wheat-rye cross, sweet peas from a previous crop were adding a pink note to the lace-tablecloth effect of white pyrethrum daisies, frogs croaked in the marshes around the dam and blackwoods and eucalypts grew along the creek that leaves the property cleaner than when it comes in.
Robert Nichols has planted 5000 trees and is working at creating an ecologically sustainable habitat for native wildlife on the farm. The five frogs that are endemic to the area have all been attracted to the marsh and a family of musk ducks is nesting on the dam.
In all this, it’s not the four groups of poultry sheds dotted about the property that catch the eye. Robert refers to the land beyond the factory and office buildings as “the downs” and says, apart from fences instead of hedgerows and the native trees, it is similar to the land in Leicester his family left 18 years ago for Sassafras in northern Tasmania.
In Leicester Mike and Mary Nichols ran a battery-hen egg farm. When they came here, they and their three sons, including 18-year-old Robert “never wanted to see a chicken again”, but, he says, “you get back to what you feel comfortable with”.
However, he definitely wasn’t comfortable with cages, so produced free-range eggs, and might still be doing so if it were not for the quota system that restricted production and prompted the move to raising poultry for eating. Poultry production for meat began in 1988.
Mike and Mary live on the Sassafras farm, as do Robert, his wife Jo and their three daughters. Another son, Andrew and his wife Carolyn live on an even more scenic farm surrounded on three sides by Rocky Cape national park at Sisters Creek. Douglas is the only son who has “escaped” chickens – he lives in Hobart and works in computing.
Tasmanians have cause to be glad that the rest of the family stayed with poultry to supply us with a superior product. As the sign on the back of the Nichols Poultry delivery truck says: “Anything else is just fowl.”
Adherence to a commitment to quality is easier because Nichols controls every step of production – this is a first-to-last, or fully integrated, operation, from the waving wheat to delivery.
The Sassafras farm produces 2000 tonnes of grain a year to go into a feed based on soya beans. Some fish meal is used in the feed because it’s a high-quality protein, but no animal fats, and no antibiotics or other growth promotants or artificial additives go in.
Nichols can be confident this is so because the grain is milled and the feed pelletised on the farm into 11 different rations for turkeys and chickens at different stages, including special rations for the for breeding chickens. The vegetarian diet gives Nichols poultry its first flavour differential from the “just fowl”.
Turkeys come from an outside hatchery, but chicks are raised by Andrew at Sisters Creek.
Nichols chickens raised in a low-intensity production, get the run of very large barns that have no partitions. In fact, they seem not to avail themselves of the space by ranging widely. Robert said Andrew once tried to demonstrate this by painting a chicken blue. But the blue chook panicked and raced madly around the barn, followed by all the others. It had to be put in “solitary confinement” until the colour faded, said Robert.
The chickens took no notice of our visit, but turkeys gathered around to talk gobbledy gook. Turkeys have just enough intelligence to get themselves into trouble, but not enough to get out of it. Someone has to check on them morning and night to make sure none of the young ones has gone to sleep in the water tray or tied a dropped piece of string around its neck.
Finicky and self-destructive, turkeys are known for being difficult to grow. In all Robert’s travels and study, he has found only one other farm, in Northern Ireland, that grows both turkeys and chickens.
One of the things a cook notices the first time they bake a Nichols chicken is that a No. 12 chicken that goes into the oven comes out weighing almost 1.2kg; that when a fillet is panfried it does not release a watery “juice”.
This is because of the way chickens are cooled when they are processed. Nichols is one of very few commercial processors in Australia who do not chill the plucked birds by immersing them in cold water. Instead, Nichols chickens are cooled for two hours by jets of chilled air.
About 8% of the weight of a chicken chilled in water will be water, which comes out when the fillet hits the pan, whereas the air-chilled chicken loses about 2% of its weight during chilling and there is very little shrinkage during cooking.
And because the birds are not cooled in water, when they are frozen they do not contain the tiny icicles that break down flesh. Once they are cooked you would be hard put to distinguish a fresh from a frozen turkey or chicken.
Next the chickens are hung on a conveyor belt which takes them over a weighbridge that sends a message back to a computer that then tells the belt which bin to drop the chicken into according to its size.
This specialised computer program is expensive, so Robert was very pleased to pick one up second-hand. Once it was installed and set up though, he was dismayed to find all the writing on the screen was in Italian.
It did not take long to decode the Italian in a program mostly dealing in numbers, but Robert says it was “a very low moment when I realised it was in Italian”. Adding to the difficulties, the man who could talk him through teething problems was in London, driving a taxi, and available for consultation only by phoning at 4am.
About half the birds are sold whole and half are cut up for sale as thigh or breast fillets, drumsticks and such, and for new value-added lines – but not straight away. “The red-meat industry has known for years that you get tough meat if you cut it off the bone too quickly,” said Robert. Experimentation showed that a chicken cut up at six hours was “like a lump of leather” whereas, one left just half an hour longer was perfect.
Finally, Nichols staff makes up orders ready for delivery all over Tasmania. There is no minimum order – a country corner store can order three chickens, a packet of thigh fillets and one pack of chicken Spanish steak or a Coles supermarkets can order a truckload.
And while Andrew Nichols starts the process by hatching the chickens, his wife Carolyn, in 1991, began Naturally Nichols, making pies as a way of using up scraps of chicken. That business has extended in range and size, and now employs nine people and exports to the mainland.
Damian Foale, who used to run The Smokehouse at Richmond, joined Nichols in mid-2000 to develop a range of value-added products. Damian, his wife Lee and their family moved into the house on a recently purchased neighbouring farm – it had one tree when it was added to the Nichols property, but now there are 1200 saplings along the creek.
The addition of a workroom and coolstore covering 650 square metres to the complex, saw the development of a number of value-added chicken products, including chicken dijon, spanish steak in red wine, kransky sausages and salamis. And there are low-fat turkey breast rolls, pastrami and breast schnitzels.
Value-adding to turkeys is attempt to redistribute some of the pressure from Christmas sales. Half of the many thousands of turkeys that Nichols Poultry produces are sold in the week before Christmas. About seven more workers join the permanent staff of 26 and shifts go almost round the clock.
The average turkey takes 10 to 12 weeks to grow, the big male birds of 12 or 14kg that go to the catering market can take 20 weeks to grow. This makes for some tricky calculations when everything culminates in one week of frenzied turkey trading.
Fresh birds must be ordered early but frozen birds spread the work. Again, because the birds are air-chilled instead of being dipped in water, icicles don’t form in the same way and it is difficult to distinguish between a fresh and frozen bird once they are cooked.
The Christmas rush leaves “a very Christmassy family” (Naturally Nichols makes Christmas puddings and stuffing for birds) almost too exhausted to celebrate.
The families get together and Carolyn Nichols says after dinner there is a complete ban on talking about poultry, but, “Rob, Andrew and Mike, by devious means – talking in code and Robert’s party trick of talking backwards fluently – talk about Easter demand, and they are away on what the children call a ‘bored’ meeting”.
Robert taught himself to talk backwards – each word, not the whole sentence – as a 10-year-old when he was bored in a physics class. Now he wishes he had paid more attention to the physics, but still has his arcane schoolboy skill.
As we looked over the farm he pointed out 50-acre paddocks of potatoes and 50 acres of poppies.
“You don’t talk hectares,” I remarked. “Oh, I can,” said Robert. “I can talk forwards, backwards, English, Italian, hectares or acres.”
Elaine Reeves is food writer for The Mercury. An edited version of this article first appeared in The Mercury.
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Thursday, July 31, 2003