“These hens don’t even know how to move in such a large space when they get here. It takes them months, years, to learn”. It only takes a few words from Giulio Apollonio to understand the horror of intensive farming, places where animals are reduced to mere objects and within which they lose entirely their nature.
We are in Cutrofiano, Salento, in the province of Lecce. Approximately six thousand hens and three hundred cocks of different breeds roam in the Uovo Perfetto park. Their feed is exclusively natural, partly from the pasture land itself, partly from natural feed.
Hens out to pasture!
Giulio Apollonio’s farm was established in 2018 and operates according to entirely different standards than intensive livestock farming. In fact, the hens have twenty-five thousand square metres of pasture where they can roam freely and houses to shelter from rain or too much sun. This is a remarkable change from the intensive farms where the Uovo Perfetto hens come from and where at around eighteen months they would be ready for slaughter, whereas their life expectancy in a natural environment is around ten years. Here, these animals find a new chance and a new dignity.
In a hen’s mind
The basic idea is that man should intervene as little as possible: no antibiotics, no chemicals, nothing that would push productivity beyond the animal’s limits.
Quality of life, quality product
It sounds like science fiction in a time when profit always dictates the law; instead, these are the words of a farmer whose model works, so much so that CNN and the BBC even covered him, the latter at COP26 in Glasgow.
And speaking of productivity, these hens produce around 700 to 800 eggs per day, eggs that are qualitatively superior to those we are used to finding on the shelves, precisely because, as the farmer says, ‘they reflect what each hen eats and the quality of life she leads‘.
Almost needless to say, ‘perfect eggs’ are now in great demand and shipped daily to Italy and various European countries starting with Belgium (especially Brussels), the Czech Republic and Hungary. “Uovo Perfetto is a life choice. It is taking risks to start an activity that must be profitable and remunerative but carried out with ethics, conscience and love“.
Congratulations to Giulio Apollonio, who respects nature, focuses on quality and brings Italy to the world!
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