From scraps to soil: How retired hens are reshaping farming in Cyprus

In Cyprus, the Kot-Kot project shows how animals, food waste and farming can be reconnected to restore soils and reduce reliance on chemicals. But as writer and researcher David McKenzie explores, the challenges it faces highlight a broader dilemma: will food systems reward regenerative, mixed models like this – or continue to favour industrial approaches that externalise their costs?

There is no single solution to building sustainable food futures. Nor is there a silver bullet for establishing resilient food systems that can best respond to the unpredictable impacts and challenges of climate change. It will take a concerted effort, with myriad approaches and solutions working together.

Still, some solutions have more of a ‘feel-good’ factor than others. And this might be one of them.

An olive grove in Cyprus has been taking an innovative (yet incredibly simple) approach to enhancing the organic matter of their soil, while also helping combat the island’s serious food waste problem and providing a means of reducing chemical fertiliser and pesticide use. It’s doing this by taking retired hens from the egg industry and having them roam free on the grove, fed by unwanted food-waste collected from local schools, restaurants, hotels and businesses.

The project, called Kot-Kot, has been running since early 2024 at Akaki Grove, 30 kilometers west of the capital Nicosia. It was instigated by farmer Elena Christoforos, who inherited the semi-abandoned olive grove from her grandfather, and Nicolas Netien, an environmental engineer and soil biologist who Christoforos brought on board in 2021 to help revive the olive and citrus trees.

“My focus is always on growing soil,” says Netien, who has been designing agro-ecological systems in line with a permaculture framework for 20 years. “I grow soil and let the trees grow themselves.”

Within that framework, Netien looks for any and every technique to increase organic matter in the soil, he says, focusing on maintaining a healthy microbiome for the trees’ root systems. In line with this, a diverse ground cover of plants was first established at Akaki Grove to enrich and protect the soil. But Netien wanted to “speed up” these natural processes and carbon cycles by having animals grazing the ground cover.

Christoforos agreed, but as a vegan, she has a zero-kill policy at the grove, instead favouring the maintenance of balanced, diverse ecosystems in which pests kill each other. She insisted that they could only do it if the animals were not to be killed or used for egg, meat or milk production.

That’s where the “happy hens” come in. Animals are expensive to keep and to feed, and if they weren’t going to have them for meat, egg or dairy production then it made sense, as Netien puts it, to find animals that nobody wants. Chickens, in particular, are “great workers” for the olive trees, since they not only clear the ground cover and unwanted weeds, reverting nutrients back into the soil via their fertile droppings but also provide excellent pest control by pecking at the larvae of insects like the infamous olive fly, traditional adversary of Mediterranean olive growers.

And so, with the help of free-range egg farmer and olive grower Nicholas Schizas, Kot-Kot managed to adopt a few hundred two-year-old hens coming out of the egg industry, who have finished their productive laying years and otherwise would’ve been slaughtered (yet still with plenty of ‘retirement’ years ahead, having a life expectancy of eight years or more).

From there, the next issue was sourcing food for the hens. Again, without any income that would usually come from egg or meat production, this needed to be cheap (if not free).

Coincidentally, however, Cyprus has a terrible food waste problem.

Cyprus generates by far the most food waste per capita of any country in Europe at around 300 kg per year, more than double the EU average of 132 kg/inhabitant. To make matters worse, the island nation’s waste management system has been mired in scandal and mismanagement for years, leading to hefty fines from the EU for continuously failing to meet waste management targets and failing to establish adequate facilities for processing mixed municipal waste (including organic waste), despite heavy EU funding specifically for such projects since at least 2015.

The Kot-Kot project’s food waste bins which are used as a food source for the chickens – credit to @kotkotcyprus on Instagram.

 

As a result, almost all of that EU-leading food waste in Cyprus ends up in landfill, where it decomposes and emits high levels of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with nearly 30 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period (and a staggering 84 times more potent on a 20-year timescale).

Intercepting some of this food waste, therefore, seemed a logical way to provide food for the chickens, and so Kot-Kot started establishing food waste collection and donation networks with local schools, restaurants, hotels and businesses. This also led to the creation of a successful educational programme with one school in Nicosia, in which 800 kids collected scraps that they then fed to the chickens, while also learning about the importance of food production working with, rather than against, nature.

All in all, it’s a nice, happy story. The problem, however, is that it seems unlikely to continue, since the project has been unable to attract any kind of funding or support from local institutions or businesses.

One very important part of the project, according to Netien, is being able to measure its impact, so it can be used as a formula for others to follow. After all, if we are truly to transition to sustainable food and farming systems, we need quantifiable data – as facilitated by frameworks like the Global Farm Metric – that can prove positive results and highlight potential shortcomings of different solutions.

But having the ability to measure and quantify the impact precisely, is important for being able to replicate the Kot-Kot project elsewhere. For example, having more agronomic data on how many chickens should be grazed, at which parts of the olive grove (e.g. according to tree age), and for how long, based on leaf analysis from the olive trees showing exactly how much nitrogen the chickens are delivering (so as not to make the trees ‘too happy’ that they don’t produce fruit) would be useful. But until the project gets upscaled, access to such resources is limited.

Kot-Kot was initially estimated to be capable of scaling up to having 15,000 chickens on the grove, saving 550,000 kg of food waste from landfill (and 1.15 million kg of CO₂) per year, but it seems unlikely to be able to do so now.

The idea of using food scraps to feed chickens, or using chickens as a source of fertiliser and pest control as part of low-input farming systems, is nothing new, of course. Trudging the slop bucket out to the pigs or chooks (despite technically being illegal) is a well-worn trope of British barnyard life; ‘chicken tractors’ have been used by organic veg farmers for years; and municipal authorities in French and Belgian towns have even been handing out free chickens to local residents to help deal with food waste, for at least a decade.

The chickens at the Kot-Kot project scratch and fertilise the orange grove – credit to @kotkotcyprus on Instagram.

 

Still, what makes the Kot-Kot example different is that this is not just a small household or hobby farmer feeding a few scraps to a few hens. This is an example of a sophisticated farming system producing a high-quality commercial product: certified organic extra virgin olive oil, with exceptionally high levels of healthy polyphenols.

Similarly, using would-be waste food instead of costly energy-intensive stockfeed, while also lessening reliance on chemical fertilisers, could provide obvious advantages for building resilience and sustainability in farming systems.

But things aren’t quite that simple in the UK. There is an ongoing debate and discussion around allowing food waste to be used as livestock feed in the UK (especially in the pork industry, which shows strong producer support for the move), just as it had been for hundreds of years before the Foot & Mouth Disease outbreak in 2001. But it is still not allowed, and many are wary of bringing it back – particularly in an unregulated form and particularly with bird flu on the rise, whether or not it’s used to produce food for human consumption.

Then, of course, there’s the issue of corporate and industrial interest in food waste for biofuel production. Although there are serious concerns about the sustainability of biomethane production, it seems to be a large part of the UK Government’s pledge to be carbon neutral by 2050. Recent legislation obligating businesses (this year) and households (next year) to separate food waste from other waste streams, combined with plans to open dozens more biofuel processing plants, seems to back this up. Food waste is one of the two main ‘feedstocks’ used to make biofuel (along with specifically grown crops, such as maize), accounting for around 30% of biofuel inputs. In other words, this expanding industry has a vested interest in increasing the amount of food waste that gets converted into biofuel and would be unlikely to take kindly to the idea of it being given over to livestock production or other industries.

Going back to that opening idea, though, of needing a combination of different solutions in order to bring about true transition to sustainable food systems – it could be worth using the Kot-Kot example to help think about a few things.

Is the UK’s supercharged drive towards biomethane production putting a lot of eggs in one (potentially very damaging and unsustainable) basket? Instead, is it time to reassess the safe use of food waste as animal feed, and therefore reduce reliance on costly, energy, land and emissions-heavy feed? What about using food-waste-fed chickens, as one means of lessening reliance on the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers?

It may be a seemingly simple system, but the questions that Kot-Kot provokes about our wider food system are complex. By showing how the health of soil, plants, animals and people can be connected in mutually beneficial ways, Kot-Kot reminds us that the future of farming may lie not in single solutions, but in integrated, mixed systems that recycle nutrients, reduce waste and regenerate soils. Crucially, initiatives like Kot-Kot can only flourish if they are properly supported and rewarded for the multiple public goods they deliver and recognised as vital building blocks of a resilient food and farming future.

 

To find out more about the Kot-Kot project, visit their website or follow them on Instagram.