Concentrating on doing one thing and doing it well

Headnote

Having a tight focus is the key to success in the turkey business, as Ken Randall discovers

Success stories in the allyear-round turkey trade are rare these days, but one company, Shoby Poultry based near Melton Mowbray, has gone from strength to strengtii by concentrating on one thing and doing it well.

As the UK industry has contracted, this business has made a speciality of supplying nine-week-old growing turkey stags to the major UK players, plus many of die remaining smaller independent all-year-round producers.

"In fact, we supply just about everyone left in die all-year-round UK turkey industry mese days," says proprietor James Chandler, who runs the family business with his wife Jill. "We are now the third-largest producer of turkeys in die UK," he claims, "and no other business in die UK is identical to this."

The core activity is hatching and brooding turkey stags, and then rearing tiiem on to nine weeks. This is acknowledged to be the trickiest part of the turkey production process. By providing this service to a high standard, Shoby has expanded steadily over recent years, at a time when die UK industry has contracted just as steadily.

The company is now placing around 18,000 day-old stags a week, of which around a quarter are placed on diree company-owned sites away from die hatchery, and the rest on contracted independent rearing farms all over the UK. An equal number of females are exported as day-olds.

Mr Chandler puts his success down to exercising control over each stage of die operation and die attention to detail at which a familyrun business can excel.

"We do everything, from die egg to die finished grower for sale," says Mr Chandler. "We have our own catching team, our own lorries, our own poult delivery vehicles."

It certainly isn't dependent on using the latest technology: some of the Western incubators in the hatchery are 35 years old, lovingly maintained and still delivering excellent results. "We hatch 38-40,000 poults every week. Most weeks, one flock will achieve over 90% hatchability, and die average we expect for a heavy strain is...