Award for Patrick’s one man brand
When the Barrington Park Estate 10,000 bird organic laying unit was honoured by the egg industry the entire staff went up to accept the award.
Which is to say that once again Patrick Bourns, unit manager, egg picker, packer, poultryman, retail strategist, marketing executive and salesman was on his own.
Because the creation of Britain’s newest organic brand has been built around a workforce of one.
Working a non-stop 15-hour day 30 years old Patrick not only picks all the eggs himself but does all the other jobs in and around the five mobile sheds that make up the Soil Association unit based near Witney in Oxfordshire.
“Actually,” he says, “I’m a very fast egg picker and even though I pick twice a day it doesn’t seem to take that long. I work on my own but I really love this job, I enjoy myself.”
When it came to retailing his own eggs the same enthusiasm and single-mindedness went into operation. He targeted quality food retailers in South West London on the internet, produced himself a brochure and then simply took to the streets.
“I just went into shops, showed them what we were doing and asked if they wanted to buy,” he explains, “in time I picked up fourteen customers in London and another fifteen locally.”
It is enough to absorb around twenty per cent of output from the Barrington Park flock and to have won a Small Enterprise of the Year accolade in the British Egg Awards 2005. But it is not so long since the entire operation faced a very different future.
“The unit simply wasn’t making enough money,” says Patrick, “and serious consideration was being given to its future.”
But a change of packer, as well as the success of the direct sales, brought a complete change of fortune. Patrick now sends the bulk of his production to Stonegate to be sold under the Columbian Blacktail label. “Stonegate are excellent,” he says, “they really understand the idea of a quality product and they really look after the producer. They also pay more for the eggs and the number of seconds we record with the packing station has reduced dramatically.”
In fact at the moment Patrick Bourns has only one complaint…and that’s against the cut-throat egg industry itself.
“Organic eggs were never supposed to be a low value product,” he says, “so I cannot understand why so many people want to off load them so cheaply. We are selling our eggs for £2.15p a dozen yet we are competing with organic suppliers who sell OF&G eggs for £1.65p. Now given the cost of production, packaging and transport that simply does not make any sense at all.
“There is a big enough market out there for all of us. So why do people want to lower the value of what we produce in this way?”
Patrick, the son of NFU national poultry board chairman Charles Bourns, may be a passionate egg man but he says he “fell into” the business by chance.
A former unit manager at Bernard Mathews he had returned to college when he spotted an advert for a poultry person to set up a unit on the 5000 acre Barrington Park Estate. He put in a call and landed the job. That was six years ago. “When I arrived there was nothing here at all, not a shed and not a hen,“ he explains, “so I just started from the beginning.”
The original five small Liberty Livestock mobiles have already been sold back to the company in an exchange for larger buildings with added verandahs. Each building is allotted four hectares and is moved at the end of lay about 20 metres from one stone platform to another. The one-man operation is able to manage a turnaround in just a week thanks to the one concession to outside help, contract shed cleaners.
And as to the future? In time he would like to follow his father into agricultural politics. “But the thing about the poultry industry,” he says, “is that it believes that if you are a young person you know nothing.”
So meanwhile he is working on plans that could double the size of the current Barrington egg production unit within a year.
“And that,” he says, “would of course make it a two man operation.”
