Amelie Niederbuchner

Les Bleues

In Locking, a village in Upper Bavaria, Florian Reiter and Joanna Kantorowicz run an organic small-scale farm with Bresse chickens. The chickens, due to their blue feet also known as Les Bleues, are a special breed from the french Bresse region and famous for their exclusive taste.

Les Bleues can be used as what Florian explains to me as 'Zweitnutzungshühner'. This means that the male chicks don't get shreddered after birth, a practice that is very common in factory farming. Instead both sexes are grown up to what they are best for: The female chickens as laying hens and the male ones for meat production.

I visited the two for a morning to find out more about their business and vision.

Florian Reiter

View of the farm from up the hill. The surrounding fields belong to the farm and are used to grow the feed for the chickens.

Joanna Kantorowicz

Currently two groups of 350-500 roosters each live on the farm. They get to live around four times longer than a conventional rooster in factory farming does.

The roosters have a spacious shed with stray inside and fields outside where they can pick for worms and take baths in the sand.

The farm belongs to Florian's family since many generations. His parents still help whenever they can.

"What people underestimate is the amount of work you have to put in this“, Florian tells me. „We want to make a difference, that's what keeps us going."