Noble Foods improves biodiversity, chickens enjoy more shade

Noble Foods colleagues Zoe Harding-Hubbard, Kriss Brown, Lee Green and Kat Harvey worked among Beckingham Farm’s free-range flock. Photos: Noble Foods

As part of its Environmental Sustainability Programme, Noble Foods is continuing its tree planting scheme to help increase tree-cover and biodiversity levels across its poultry farms.

The chickens were very inquisitive during the tree-planting.

Led by the company’s head of Sustainability, Glenn Evans, volunteers from Noble Foods‘ Gainsborough Poultry site planted over 950 trees over 3 days among Beckingham Farm’s free-range flock to help improve the overall tree canopy.

The additional trees, including Crab Apple, Elder and Hazel varieties, will link existing areas of woodland together to further enhance biodiversity on the site, and the chickens will benefit from more natural shade.

This recent tree planting brings the total number of trees planted by Noble Foods to over 4,900 this year. The company says that planting trees is important to Noble Foods and is part of its Biodiversity Action Plan, which aims to sustain and increase biodiversity levels across all owned sites.

“The way we interact with our local environments has been core to Noble Foods for quite some time,” said Evans. “Our plan is to have Biodiversity Action Plans in place for all our sites by 2025. These plans will help us action the building blocks we need to encourage wildlife and improve biodiversity levels for the future.”