Aurum Poultry Co popular Asian style twist on Australian poultry

Aurum Poultry Co contracts growers across Victoria to grow a high quality, slow growth poultry products, including corn fed duck, silkie chicken, pullet and cockerel.

Kenneth Chan, Aurum Poultry Co's marketing manager said their focus is producing a high quality, fresh product targeted towards chefs, home cooks and people who appreciate the flavour of a slow grown poultry product.

Tyrone Scott, livestock and technical services manager from Scolexia, a third party avian and animal health care consultancy to Aurum Poultry Co said one benefit was that as cockerels, their primary product, were often a by-product of the layer industry this market could reduce waste.

"We're obviously a niche market, with not a huge amount of birds compared to the broiler industry, but we are using a product that otherwise wouldn't used for anything," Mr Scott said.

"Definitely in terms of the broiler farms, and with a much quicker growing bird, they might do five or six batches of birds a year, where as we're only doing two or three, there's generally a lot less production cycles through the farm."

Most of the bird is kept for resale once processed in their own abattoir facility in Albion, including heads, feet, testicles, comb and liver with the golden flesh of the bird a highly valued.

"There's not many processing plants in Australia that process birds and leave the heads and feet on," Mr Scott said.

Many of the farms contracted to Aurum Poultry Co are former broiler growers who either moved away from the broiler industry or had contracts cancelled according to Mr Scott.

Joe Acciarito owns Taylareign Farm in Werribee South, where he looks after three barns of cockerels and pullet chicken, with up to 22,000 birds to a barn.

He said he's been working with Aurum Poultry Co for about seven years, but had raised broilers for over 50 years, formerly with Baiada.

"The cockerels are a lot less stressful to the grower, they're less susceptible to heat, the density's are a lot lower and they're just a much easier bird to grow."

"Because they're slow growing their metabolism is so much slower and it's much easier to manager them as well."

He said despite the decades working with broiler chickens, he much preferred the cockerels and slow growth birds even down to their nature.

If there's a repair needed in one of the sheds he found birds to be inquisitive in nature and insistent on climbing around him.

Joe Acciarito, Taylareign Farm, Werribee South grows poultry for Aurum Poultry Co, as an ex-broiler grower he said this is much less intensive in the turnover, but