Utopia has an appetite.
She fills her stomach with shiny golden grains, romp about on straw pellets in her comfort stall, beats almost all her peers in terms of taste and is obviously not a utopia at all, but the daily bread of the young farmer Benedikt Hachmann.
Jakob Strobel and Serra
deputy head of the feature section.
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He breeds Kikok chickens in Delbrücker Land in East Westphalia and makes sure that he, like them, has a good life.
Not forty thousand animals like the competition from the usual mass animal breeding, but a maximum of thirty thousand chickens share a barn with him.
Not after 28 days, but at the earliest after 42 and sometimes only after 51 days, he slaughters the animals, which are raised almost exclusively with high-quality corn and rye from hand-picked suppliers and, thanks to these decelerated living conditions, have become so resilient that Hachmann has completely stopped using antibiotics can do without - nothing but supposedly small differences between it and conventional agriculture, which, however, bring fundamental advantages and could lead not only to Germany's poultry farming, but the entire agricultural animal husbandry into a better future.
It's a lot easier than we think
The mantra of the advocates of industrial farming is that it is utopian to convert all livestock farming to standards such as the Kikok chickens, unreasonable for the farmers, unaffordable for the consumers, where then is the human right to a daily ration of tasteless meat? that white nothingness of aseptically flavored chicken breast garnished with lettuce?
It's very simple, says Ulrich Düfelsiek, sales manager at the Delbrücker poultry breeder Borgmeier and one of the fathers of the Kikok chicken: if you reduce the number of animals in the stalls by just ten percent and lengthen the rearing period by a tenth, what the prices at the shop counter by a maximum of twenty percent, then you would have the long-awaited agriculture for the benefit of animals and people - that's how tangible the supposedly unattainable is, which jumps around in farmer Hachmann's stable as living proof to the contrary.
The invention of the Kikok chicken was an act of desperation.
Heiner and Werner Borgmeier, third-generation poultry farmers, spoiled the appetite enormously with the highly bred hybrid turbo chickens, which were mainly supplied to them from America.
Although they grew faster and faster, they also tasted less and less meaningful.
So in 1993, together with Ulrich Düfelsiek, they decided to breed a slow-growing, healthy, non-antibiotic-stuffed chicken that would taste like the animals that grandfather Borgmeier used to roam from door to door in Westphalia at the beginning of the 20th century.
And it should deliberately not be an elite niche product, not a German Bresse, but a chicken for everyone - at least for all those who are willing