Made in Britain finalist: Clare's Organics Chicken

Country Living magazine features local food producers every month - the Made in Britain Awards were launched by the magazine, together with Waitrose and Farmers Guardian, to reward those who are creating the best-quality and most innnovative foods, while keeping traditional skills alive. Five food producers of the year each received £5,000 from Waitrose to develop their business. The overall Made in Britain Food Champion (selected from these five) received an additional £5,000. Seven finalists were given the chance to have their product stocked in local branches of Waitrose. The Farmers Guardian Best Farm Entrepreneur will also receive £5,000 from Waitrose.

It's one thing to moan about the disappointing food on offer in local shops and restaurants. It's a quite another to give up your
job, home and security to have a go at producing your own. But three
years ago that's exactly what Paul Sykes did, swapping full-time job
and family house for an organic chicken farm. His wife, Clare, an
investment actuary, was behind him all the way. "We sold our home
in Swindon and rented a house and some farmland on the Wiltshire/
Oxfordshire border," Paul says. "It's been hard but we'd do it again."

Clare's Organics' chickens are as tasty as they come, with fine flesh
and crispy golden skin that delights even without the thyme, lemon and garlic in their cooking instructions. At the farmers' markets in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and London's "We try to use every part of the bird - a chicken sold without its giblets is a crime to gravy" Notting Hill where the couple sell most of their birds, the feedback is so positive that it justifies 14-hour days and seven-day weeks. "People tell us it's the best chicken they've ever tasted," says Paul, who used to sell trucks and had no previous farming experience.

He's in no doubt that a smallscale, low-stress farming system is
the key to rearing such delicious meat. "We went into this because
we couldn't find a local source of slow-grown chickens that had had a good life," Paul explains. "Even high-welfare systems, where the
chickens are well looked after, often produce thousands of birds a week. We wanted to rear them more traditionally, giving each bird
attention, because we wanted them to taste like chicken used to."

Unlike most poultry producers, who rear chicks in brooding houses before moving them to field houses at four weeks old, Paul keeps his birds - bought as day-old chicks from a local organic hatchery - in the same house for their entire lives, which eliminates the shock of moving and helps them build up healthy immune systems. Once fully feathered at three weeks old, they spend as much time as they like in the field, where Paul has planted six-footwide strips of clover, kale, mustard and black sunflower to provide shade, seeds and insects. "It's like a  gourmet larder," says Paul, who rents 10 acres of organic land on which eight mobile poultry sheds house 200-300 birds each.

To minimise distress at the end of their lives, Paul uses a mobile slaughterman to kill and dress the birds on the farm at 10-12 weeks (twice the age of a conventional chicken). "We started off using a local abattoir, but I wasn't happy handing over my birds to someone else. If they were stressed at the end, it would undo all my good work. The week after we started processing them here, most of my customers asked, ‘What have you done with your chickens? They taste different, really amazing.'"

Paul and Clare would love to sell their chickens locally but have been disappointed by people's reluctance to pay a fair price for properly reared poultry. "Chicken isn't seen as a luxury meat because of the way it's been cheapened by mass production," he says. "But eating chicken should be a special event - a meal to look forward to."

Clare's Organics (01367 242077; www.claresorganics.co.uk)

Find all of this year's Made in Britain Awards winners here 

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