Eggs

Glenrath Farms

The home of rotting birds and dodgy donations

Status

Something smells a bit off with Glenrath’s marketing. Search online for Glenrath Farms and you’ll see idyllic images of birds in pastures. What you don’t see – because they don’t show you – are all the birds they still lock in cages.

Not only have they airbrushed their own actions, those cheeky monkeys have also dropped the word “cage” altogether, and simply made up their own phrase to describe where the birds live (and by “live” we also mean “die”). Instead of saying “enriched cages” or “colony cages”, which is what those cages are actually called, Glenrath Farms prefers the term “enriched colony”, which sounds like the birds are on a 5* spa break instead of locked inside a wire-mesh prison. Glenrath did promise to go cage-free by 2025,¹ but things have gone rather quiet on that front so we can only assume that promise has gone for a Burton. So, for now, just for fun, go ahead and enjoy a game of “spot the difference” between the images Glenrath likes to share online and the filthy packed sheds with dead birds all over the floor that investigators find when they visit. It’s just so hard to know who to believe.

Headquarters:

Peeblesshire, Scotland

Founded:

1959

Revenue:

£91 million²

Supplies

Violations

Animal Cruelty ^#2

A 2023 investigation into Glenrath Farms revealed dead birds rotting on the floor, injuries, painful growths, deformed beaks, serious feather loss, and “free range” birds kept indoors for days.³ Shockingly, Glenrath Farms not only denied the suffering, they suggested the investigators had disturbed the birds and may even have caused their deaths.⁴ The absolute chutzpah.

Glenrath Farms, like all industrial egg-producing corporations, sends the birds to slaughter when they start to lay fewer eggs than the company wants. Strangely, they make no mention of this on their website.

Community Impacts ^#2

Local residents commissioned their own reports when a new 40,000-bird Glenrath Farms unit was planned, and found that the chicken manure it would produce would likely create major problems for the local communities and for the sensitive ecology of the River Tweed.⁵ Their serious concerns were not heeded, however, and the farm was built.

A bird flu outbreak at Glenrath Farms in 2025 led to the deaths of the birds and risked the health of workers and local residents.⁶ In 2026, there was yet another outbreak on one of its farms.⁷ Bird flu can infect people, with recorded human fatalities globally, and is described as a “major threat to humans”.⁸

Dubious Business ^#4

For reasons we can only guess at, Glenrath Farms donated £10,000 to MP David Mundell in 2020⁹, just before the shocking revelation of the birds’ suffering hit the headlines. Mundell was urged to hand the cash back¹⁰, but appears not to have done so, despite having championed his own animal welfare credentials.¹¹

When the local council turned down a planning application by Glenrath Farms to build sheds for another 32,000 birds, the decision was overturned by the Scottish government on appeal.¹²

And Glenrath Farms does seem to have friends in high places. In 2010, they were given £745,000 – hey, thanks taxpayer! – to install bigger cages to lock their hens in.¹³

Then, seven years later, the government gave them another £427,000 for equipment that any other industry would buy itself instead of holding out its begging bowl for public money.¹⁴

Environment Impacts ^#1

In 2019, Glenrath Farms was the second biggest ammonia polluter in Scotland, after 2 Sisters.¹⁵ Ammonia poses a risk to the environment but also to human health, particularly when it combines with vehicle and industrial pollution to form tiny airborne particles.

Worst Practices

Empty Promises

They Say...

Glenrath Farms has recently introduced plastic egg trays. Plastic trays are not only environmentally friendly but help to improve the bio-security on the farms and have a long lifespan.

We Say…

Plastic? Environmentally friendly?! Do you think we’ve had a knock to the head? Plastic’s very long lifespan, of up to 500 years, is largely spent polluting the land and aquatic environments, entering our food chain, killing wildlife, and finding its way into every organ of the human body.¹⁶