About Us
To understand more about Darwalla as a vertically integrated operation, please view the video.
Rearing
Specialist breeding company Aviagen deliver day-old parent stock chicks to our rearing farms in Laidley and Killarney. These birds are reared for 21 weeks under close supervision to ensure the healthiest birds.
Our teams concentrate on bird health, body weight, and conformation to grow happy, healthy, uniform male and female chickens.
Breeders
At around 21 weeks of age the rearing birds are transferred to one of our production farms on the Southern Darling Downs. Here our staff are focussed on bringing the birds into the production of fertile eggs.
The teams concentrate on bird health, body weight and fertility of the hatching eggs. All our rearing and breeder chickens are housed on bio-secure farms, in modern climate-controlled facilities.
Hatchery
The breeder eggs are transferred to our hatchery in Allora, where they are incubated for 21 days. Hygiene is vital for young chicks, and the hatchery team keep our new facility spotlessly clean while managing the incubation process closely to achieve optimum hatchability.
Our goal is to provide our broiler growers with the healthiest day old chicks, which are transferred to farms on the day of hatch.
Broilers
Day old chicks are placed in modern growing facilities under the care of farmers whose total focused is bird health and welfare. The chicks are grown in comfortable conditions, both free range and barn raised, to achieve optimum growth and feed conversion. Birds are grown to our customers’ requirements, hand-caught and delivered to our processing plants.
Darwalla is an Approved Producer for farming Meat Chickens both indoor and outdoor standards under the RSPCA Approved Farming Scheme and also have FREPA accreditation for free-range.
Feed Mill
Our in-house grain purchasing and weighbridge ensures optimum ingredients are delivered to our feed mill, where Darwalla’s FeedSafe accredited mill turns the raw ingredients into high quality poultry feed.
Nutrition and feed form is a focus for the feed mill team, who ensures efficient production and feed delivery to meet the birds’ growth requirements.
Support Teams
Darwalla’s support teams collectively support production areas to grow great chicken. We have a variety of highly-skilled people working together in various roles including:
- QHSE (quality, health, safety & environment)
- IT
- finance
- maintenance
- HR (human resources)
- management
About Darwalla
Darwalla Group is a proud Australian Family Business and is the largest Queensland-owned poultry producer. The Benfer Family commenced operations at Mt Cotton in 1933 and today grow in excess of 28 million chickens each year in their facilities located throughout South-East Queensland.
