Customers line up for meaty organic chickens from a Jutland farm slaughterhouse.

The organic chickens in the poultry yard at Skyttegaarden, located just outside Haderslev, walk around scratching and pecking at the ground beneath the tall poplar trees. Perhaps there are a few tasty morsels hidden there. Elsewhere, a group of the white, slow-growing Hubbard chickens has gathered on top of an old play structure. Several years ago, it featured in an advertisement for organic chickens. Fortunately, the chickens do not know that their meat has now become so popular with both private customers and renowned chefs that Nikolaj Dalsgaard and Andreas Barsøe no longer need to set aside money in the budget for marketing. It proved to be a steep learning curve when the two farmers from Southern Jutland chose to become organic chicken producers in 2025 and, a few years later, reluctantly decided to establish their own on-farm slaughterhouse. But they have had no reason to regret their decisions. “In the beginning, it could be quite stressful to sit and negotiate the price with a buyer who was leaning forward over the table and saying that they wanted an exclusive agreement to sell our chickens. ‘We’re the only ones who should be allowed to sell them.’ Today, we can sit back a little more in our chairs and say: Well, then you won’t be getting that, because we don’t supply just one customer. We supply all kinds of customers, and we need to have that option,” says Nikolaj Dalsgaard, who lives at Skyttegaarden with his wife and their two children. The Southern Jutland organic farmers learned the hard way that it is risky to rely on only one sales channel after the wholesaler that took most of the on-farm slaughterhouse’s production went bankrupt in the months immediately after the slaughterhouse opened in November 2023. Today, they have built up a mix of large and small customers. ### Rented the farm from his father-in-law “Today, word about our chickens spreads by word of mouth, and our biggest challenge right now is probably that we could sell many more chickens than we are able to produce,” explain the two business partners. They are both in their late thirties and first met when, at a young age, they were both employed at the same agricultural machinery contractor. Their friendship was sealed a few years later when, in 2014, they completed their agricultural economics training at Vejlby Agricultural College. That same year, Nikolaj Dalsgaard’s father-in-law bought Skyttegaarden just outside Haderslev. In 2015, the poultry slaughterhouse Sødam asked Nikolaj Dalsgaard whether he would produce organic chickens for the slaughterhouse. He brought Andreas Barsøe on board, and together they rented Skyttegaarden and began gathering all the information they could find about organic broiler chickens. A year later, they had converted the farm’s 1,700-square-metre pig barn into three finishing houses and built three starter houses and a nine-hectare poultry yard. ### Greater focus on price than quality In the autumn of 2016, the first newly hatched chicks from Topæg in Viborg arrived in the warm starter houses. But shortly after the on-farm slaughterhouse had delivered its first batches of chickens to Sødam, the slaughterhouse was taken over by the Danpo Group, which supplied chickens to the country’s major retail chains. Dalsgaard & Barsøe went along with it. The main focus was now on hitting the right price point, and the slaughterhouse preferred small organic chickens so that the price gap compared with conventional chickens would not become too large. “The last chickens we delivered for Danpo’s De Danske Familiegårde concept weighed as little as 1,200 grams, and when we saw the chickens in the refrigerated displays in the shops, we didn’t tell anyone that we were the ones who had produced them,” says Nikolaj Dalsgaard, explaining why they terminated their contract with Danpo after a couple of years. For them, high animal welfare and the opportunity for the chickens to go outside are crucial when working with animals. They therefore believe it is a shame if the chickens are sent to slaughter after just 50 days. Their experience at Skyttegaarden shows that this is precisely when the chickens are truly ready to act on their natural instincts in the poultry yard, which is the main difference between the life of an organic chicken and that of its conventional cousin, which spends its entire life in an enclosed house without daylight. After breaking with Danpo, Dalsgaard & Barsøe exported their chickens to a German slaughterhouse for a period, but it terminated the contract with only a few days’ notice when sales of organic products in Germany fell sharply following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “At that time, we were producing around 90,000 chickens a year, and when we saw a used slaughter trailer online at the beginning of 2023, we agreed that if we were ever going to realize an old dream of establishing our own on-farm slaughterhouse, now was the time,” they explain from the farm’s staff room, which also serves as an office. ### “That is something we are happy to put our name to” By establishing their own on-farm slaughterhouse, with an annual capacity of more than 100,000 chickens, they gained full control over their choice of breed and slaughter age, as well as whom they wanted to do business with. This has brought them much closer to both private customers and, not least, the chefs in professional kitchens, who today purchase around half of Skyttegaarden’s production of slaughtered chickens. Production is limited to a maximum of 1,400 chickens a week, as handling the large birds takes extra time. According to Nikolaj Dalsgaard, slaughtering the chickens themselves has several additional benefits. One of them concerns job satisfaction: “It is satisfying to put a tiny yellow day-old chick into the starter house and follow it all the way until, at around 25 days old, it is ready to move to the finishing house, where it gains access to the poultry yard. When it is ready for slaughter, we transport it the few metres over to the slaughterhouse. There, we help with everything ourselves—from wielding the knife and packing the products to putting on a label reading ‘Dalsgaard & Barsøe’, which might end up in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen. That is something we are happy to put our name to.” ### Building a new network of customers Initially, they left responsibility for sales to the wholesaler Spis min Gris, which already bought all their organic steers. They began by slaughtering 50–100 chickens a week, but the number had risen to 700 chickens when Skyttegaarden received a letter from a lawyer in March 2024: “The wholesaler had gone bankrupt and would no longer buy any more chickens, and suddenly we were short of a considerable amount of money to pay our bills, while we had a house full of chickens that were due to be slaughtered the following week,” says Nikolaj Dalsgaard, adding: “We thought: ‘What the hell do we do now?’ But that is the challenge when you have chosen the kind of production system we have.” Through intensive efforts, however, they relatively quickly built up a mix of small and large customers. Five kilometres from the on-farm slaughterhouse, they opened a farm shop at the family farm Diddesminde, where Andreas Barsøe lives with his wife and their two children. Along the way, they entered into dialogue with Anders and Sille Duus from the organic online shop Gaardmester, which now sells a wide range of organic chicken products to private customers throughout the country, while Dalsgaard & Barsøe handle food-service sales in cooperation with a wholesaler. “Since then, we have simply stuck to producing attractive, large birds of high quality, and things have really just moved forward step by step. We actually find that we sell more on quality than on storytelling,” says Nikolaj Dalsgaard. ### The products fly out the door Dalsgaard & Barsøe know that they will never be able to compete with Danpo on efficiency. Danpo slaughters 12,000 chickens an hour, compared with 180 at the on-farm slaughterhouse, but the seven employees working in the slaughter trailer can offer something else. “We can produce nicer products and special cuts because the chickens are not cut by machine. We had a customer who called to ask for a chicken breast roast with the breast cut out with the bone still attached. I said, ‘Just a second,’ while Andreas tried to cut one out. ‘Yes, apparently we can do that,’ and then we made 60 kilograms of it. You can charge a little extra for something like that,” says Nikolaj Dalsgaard. One of their most important customers is Novo’s canteens, which are operated by Meyers Madhus. “At first, we thought we would sell most of the birds whole, but now I think we portion two-thirds of the chickens, and one of our advantages is that we are very agile.” This makes it possible to adapt to customers’ special requests, but not everything is negotiable. “If someone today thinks that our chickens are too expensive and asks us to sharpen our pencils a little more, the answer will be no, because the products are flying out the door. So if you don’t want to buy them, your neighbour will,” says Andreas Barsøe. This can be seen in the accounts, where the chickens and the revenue from the new slaughterhouse currently account for a larger share of the overall operating result than ever before. This year, they are expected to contribute 60 percent of the turnover of Dalsgaard & Barsøe Agro I/S, and they have begun considering whether to establish an additional chicken house on another property. At the same time, they are also looking forward to being able to spend a little more time on crop production, which in recent years has been somewhat overshadowed by the chickens.