The Chicken People

Counting chickens is one thing Moy Park does well, with a mere 40 million of them on the ground at any one time in Northern Ireland. In this entertaining new series, we meet some of the people behind thebusiness. Executive chef Aaron Dixon is in South America working out how to best tickle our palates, production manager Jim Trotter cracks the whip in the main factory, and we take a peep at some of the six million eggs awaiting hatching in their own specially-designed nursery.

What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Well actually, it's the farmers, and in this entertaining programme we meet the farmers who keep us in chicken. Carol Downard is a stay-at-home mum with one husband, four children and more than 50,000 chickens to look after. Breeding farmer Kevin Scullion reveals the chicken's little-known dark side. And we find out how a nifty gadget called the 'crackless egg' can save up to a million pounds a week.

Don't bring home the bacon - it's a breakfast of chicken and eggs at the Balmoral Show this year cooked up by Moy Park chefs. Happy chickens run wild in the country. And we meet Moy Park workers who have ratcheted up more than 1,000 years of work between them.