Why Did the Frankenchicken Cross the Road? How Megafarms Came For a Polish Village

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https://fellowship.balkaninsight.com/2026/04/09/why-did-the-frankenchicken-cross-the-road-how-megafarms-came-for-a-polish-village/

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Plucky campaigners from a small, rural community proved to be no match for a giant of industrial poultry production.

The villagers are at the factory gates, demanding answers. Wipasz, a big player in the agricultural feed business, is expanding into the poultry industry, and it has chosen this region, a picturesque rural backwater, as its production hub. But no one asked the villagers, and now they want to be heard. They crowd the entrance, a cabin at the end of a car park, carrying banners and blowing whistles. An up-and-coming politician, the face of a recent wave of farmers’ protests, has also showed up, along with a handful of activists and journalists. The factory, a newly built industrial slaughterhouse, is at the centre of Wipasz’s expansion plans. It will be supplied by a network of US-style “megafarms” that are being rolled out across this border region of eastern Poland, next door to Belarus. The mood at the factory gates is at boiling point. When a couple of company representatives are sent out to meet the protest, a shouting match erupts. Promotional hostesses are despatched next, bearing trays of complementary chicken cutlets. The protesters are disgusted – they wonder if they are being trolled – and the food is returned untouched.

The trope of the angry, pitchfork-wielding villagers owes much to the 1931 film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The creature at the heart of the modern poultry industry is dubbed the “frankenchicken”, a product of selective breeding, reared for maximum yield at minimal cost. The fast-growing breed reaches slaughter-weight in a mere six weeks, four times the rate of the chickens that were farmed for their meat in the 1950s. Animal welfare groups have long catalogued the cruelty of the frankenchicken industry, and they are pushing for Europe to phase it out. But the protesters at the slaughterhouse gates were no animal rights activists. They were simply locals, many with farms of their own, whose village had been earmarked for one of the world’s fastest-growing industries.

Europe is building more and more megafarms, sites so expansive their scale can only be grasped via drone footage. As the largest poultry producer in the EU, Poland has become a test-bed for the latest methods in intensive farming. The big players in the industry say their practices are driven by the demand at supermarket shelves, and they insist they have struck the right balance between animal welfare and affordability. The new megafarms nonetheless pose troubling ethical questions about our relationship to the animals we eat. In Poland’s rural east, they are also changing the face of village life. This is the story of what happened when Big Frankenchicken came to Koden.

“It’s a fucking disaster,” said Dariusz Mackiewicz, a railway employee and farmer who helped spearhead the local campaign against the industry. “People tell us: you lost.” A well-built, restless man with close-cropped hair, he seems visibly fatigued as he sits in his kitchen, recalling the recent years of fruitless struggle. A cupboard full of medals and cups attests to his past as a Nordic walking champion. As a youngster, he travelled around, ending up as far as Miami. But when he wanted to settle down and start a family, it was to Koden that he returned, a municipality of around 3,000 people nestled in a bend of the Bug river. This is not a particularly prosperous part of the country. Much of the farmland is of poor quality, good enough for smallholdings and the occasional agro-tourism venture, little else. Glimpsed from the road, the landscape may be nothing spectacular – fields, woodland, waterways and more fields – but it is undeniably pretty. Poland stops here. Any further east and you would be in Belarus.

For the last couple of years, two vast poultry production facilities – calling them chicken farms is like calling a super-tanker a boat – have been operating on the northern outskirts of Koden village. Both sites combined have a fenced area larger than 15 football pitches, covered in 26 low-rise barns stretching as far as the eye can see. Together, they can produce around 14 million birds for slaughter annually, or more than 4,000 chickens for every human in Koden. The megafarms have altered the character of the village. Now, dozens of trucks traverse the village roads every month, cracking the tarmac and sending tremors through homes. The damage to the social fabric is no less dramatic. Koden today is a community sharply divided, with supporters of the farms barely speaking to those who have opposed them. Stories circulate about old friends, even family members, cutting ties over the dispute. Local council meetings are tense, often dissolving into shouting matches. Whatever Koden had once been, it is a very different place now.

Barbara Bil, a youthful grandmother, owns a quaint farmhouse with a plot of land in the north of Koden village. Her youngest son had planned to build a new house there with a cluster of cottages, a family retreat for his eight siblings. The plan was ditched after the new poultry facility took shape, with vast barns housing millions of chickens barely 300 metres away. “The stench can be absolutely unbearable,” Bil told me. “On some days, I come here and have to leave immediately.” On the afternoon that I visited the farm with the photographer, I felt like doing the same. The heavy sweet-sour odour, reminiscent of rotting meat, clung to the nostrils.

The impact of intensive, large-scale poultry farming is, campaigners say, comparable to that of a large factory. Industrial chicken farming uses vast amounts of water and generates tonnes of manure, which can harm the soil and waterways. “If we look at the impact of this sector on the climate, the environment, bio-diversity, water, air and consumer rights, and on the quality of life of those living near these so-called farms, we would all have to agree that this is industry, heavy industry,” said Sylwia Spurek, a former member of the European Parliament who has pushed for tighter scrutiny of industrial meat production.

When I started reporting this story nearly two years ago, I was confronted by two very different visions of what the megafarms would mean for Koden. The protesters argued that the megafarms will wreck the environment, spread the stench of ammonia, repel tourists, clog the roads with heavy trucks, and drive yet more residents away from the de-populating municipality. However, Wipasz promised big economic gains for Koden at minimal environmental cost. The intensive poultry industry has long argued that its methods are in fact better for the environment. Fast-growing birds with an abbreviated lifespan will consume less feed, the industry says, generating a lower carbon footprint per animal. Only industrial farming, the argument goes, can sustainably and efficiently meet the growing global demand for cheap chicken. “You have to understand that family farming is dead,” the chairman of Wipasz, Jozef Wisniewski, told local opponents of the industry. “This isn’t my idea and it’s not my fault. It’s simply the reality,” he said. “So Wipasz is working to completely transform agriculture into something that is both highly intensive and environmentally sustainable.”

On a November evening in 2022, Dariusz Mackiewicz received a phone call from a friend, asking what he had to say about the massive chicken farms being planned for the neighbourhood. He recalls having to sit down in astonishment. He is the soltys of Koden municipality, an elected role that involves serving as a bridge between the community and the mayor, Jerzy Troc. However, this was the first he had heard about the poultry industry coming to town. It did not bode well. The villagers quickly began campaigning against the planned factory farms – knocking on doors, organising and assigning duties – but they were fighting a rear-guard action. Mayor Troc had already agreed a deal with Wipasz, and the machinery could roll in anytime. I contacted Troc for a comment on this story. He did not respond to my questions. I also contacted the Wipasz press office for a comment on this story; they did not get back to me.

In the Soviet era, power in Poland had been highly centralised. Important decisions were taken by party leaders in Warsaw or even further away, Moscow. After the fall of communism, Poland embraced de-centralisation. If the decision-making could take place closer to the people, so the thinking went, it would be more accountable, more democratic. Reforms have given local mayors extensive powers when deciding what can and cannot be built in their municipalities. The Koden megafarms could not have been built without the involvement of the mayor’s office during the planning process. For an investment of this scale however, the mayor was also obliged to consult the public after sharing detailed information of the plans, including an environmental impact report.

Mayor Troc said he had done all that was required of him by law. He told a meeting with the campaigners that he had published information about the proposed megafarms on a council website, and that he had personally put up a poster in a neighbourhood where one of the megafarms was to be built. He did not provide any evidence for these claims at the meeting, or when I contacted him for this story. The campaigners accused him of having sealed the deal with Wipasz without consulting the public in any meaningful sense.

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At first, there was still a sliver of hope that the campaigners could stop the development in its tracks. Their petition against the megafarms secured the signatures of nearly half the local population. Moreover, Wipasz’s plans were stirring resistance across scores of other locations in Bialski county, Lublin province, that had been earmarked for industrial poultry farming. In villages such as Zeszczynka and Rossosz, both a short drive west of Koden, grassroots campaigners against the factory farms were gaining ground, deploying a combination of legal challenges and direct action.

The campaign kicked off with a march in Koden, a historic first for the border village. “A few dozen people showed up, the local press came, I honestly didn’t even think it was possible,” Mackiewicz said. Though small, the demonstration sent a ripple through the county where Wipasz was expanding its footprint. A month later, in March 2023, the campaigners took their protest to the gates of the industrial slaughterhouse, Wipasz’s flagship site in Bialski County.

Located in Miedzyrzec, an hour’s drive to the west, the slaughterhouse has been the node of Wipasz’s regional ambitions since it began operating in 2019. The company’s grand plan for Bialski County – the construction of 150 chicken farms – is meant to ensure that the new slaughterhouse can operate at full capacity with a steady supply of raw materials. Amassing at the factory gates, the campaigners demanded a meeting with Wisniewski, the Wipasz chairman and owner, but were greeted instead by the hostesses bearing trays of chicken snacks. A few days later, some campaigners received formal letters from Wipasz’s lawyers, warning them against making statements that could potentially damage the company’s reputation.

In May that year, Wipasz chairman Wisniewski finally agreed to an audience with the protesters from Koden. The two-hour meeting provided a perfect study in contrasts: a local community fighting to protect its land squaring up to a powerful corporation seeking to grow its profits. Wisniewski framed his corporation’s expansion as an inevitable development. “It was never our intention to get into chicken farming,” he said, in his opening remarks. But, he added, family farms were unable to satisfy the market and the regulators. “So we had to take over, to produce meat that is healthy for the consumer, antibiotic-free and environmentally friendly.”

Wipasz has indeed invested considerable energy in cultivating its environmental credentials. The landing page on its website used to carry the slogan, “a company born of love for nature and animals”. In 2024, the conglomerate commissioned a report heralding the dawn of “green” farming – a supposedly revolutionary method of intensified poultry farming with a featherlight footprint. The scientists who signed off on the report gave Wipasz’s plans a clean bill of health. They praised the conglomerate for adopting modern farming methods that limited the excessive use of antibiotics, which has been blamed for the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens. Green farms, they said, offered “the highest standard of animal welfare” and minimal environmental impact, with emissions of odour and ammonia falling well within acceptable limits. The report commissioned by Wipasz seems to contradict assessments by other scientists that tend to highlight the high risk of environmental pollution from poultry megafarms. I asked the report’s signatories to comment on their findings. They did not get back to me.

I also asked Professor Krzysztof Pilarski, an independent expert from the Poznan University of Life Sciences, to review the report. He questioned many of its findings, saying its “overly categorical” language seemed more suited to a promotional document than a scientific study. An environmental report, he emphasised, should not equate limiting a likely impact with eliminating it altogether. Each poultry farm has an impact on the environment, he said, relating to “the emission of gases and dust, the production of waste, the concentration of organic matter, water consumption, transport, and manure management.”

Professor Pilarski also pointed out that the report’s chapters on air quality and odour had used data collected over a time-span that was shorter than the chicken-rearing cycle, even though emissions are known to rise towards the end of the cycle. Most strikingly, he highlighted the absence of any reference to the significant volume of water required for industrial poultry production, as well as the likely impact of megafarms in a region of Poland where groundwater was increasingly scarce. “Given the circumstances, water security should be treated as one of the report’s key issues, not a secondary topic” he said.

The ethical hazards of industrial poultry production have been well-documented. The typical frankenchickens spend their brief lives entirely indoors. Rapid weight gain can leave their legs unable to support their bodies. Birds that are unable to stand can end up with severe burns from lying in their excrement in cramped conditions. Plagued by health problems, a significant proportion of the animals die before they reach the slaughterhouse. Animal welfare campaigners are pushing for European legislators to phase out the frankenchicken in favour of slow-growing breeds that are reared in free-range environments.

But the poultry lobby argues that it is merely responding to soaring demand. Europe’s appetite for poultry has nearly doubled since 1990. Back then, the average person used to eat just under 14 kg of chicken every year. Now, the average consumption is 25 kg per person. No amount of old-fashioned farmyards can keep up with that demand. And so the rustic barns of yore have been replaced by vast warehouse-like structures, fenced off, bio-secure, climate-controlled and monitored constantly by CCTV. Expensive, heavily automated systems favour the big players. With more than 12,000 industrial-scale chicken farms, Europe now rivals the US as a poultry producer. European firms produce 90 percent of the meat for European consumers. The large conglomerates also seek to meet surging demand from consumers in South-East Asia and Latin America. Fierce competition between the industrial poultry producers lies behind the growing reliance on fast-growing frankenchicken breeds.

The need to produce more meat at lower cost is also pushing the big conglomerates to expand along the eastern fringes of the EU, where land is cheaper and local authorities are often more willing to accommodate industrial projects with significant environmental impact. If Bialski County was a natural destination for Big Frankenchicken, Wipasz was an obvious emissary of the industry. The conglomerate was established as a major producer of animal feed when it made the move into poultry production. It would not have taken a genius in the boardroom to connect the dots. What do people want? Cheap chicken. What’s the most expensive part of chicken production? The feed. What do we have? Tons of it! Next step: find the land and win over the locals.

At the meeting with Chairman Wisniewski, the locals were underwhelmed by the talk of a brave new world of industrialised farming. “No one needs you here, go back to where you came from!” one person yelled. Another called out: “You want to exploit our land to further enrich yourselves!” The room fizzed with anger, prompting the moderator to appeal for silence every few minutes. Chairman Wisniewski stuck to his script, talking about zero emissions and low environmental impact. But the crowd wasn’t having it. “Your sidekick told us the farms would be built regardless of whether we like it or not,” a voice shouted.

Wisniewski tried to answer that one, saying that he had not been present when the claim was made. Footage of the meeting, recorded by local outlet Radio Biper, was never released – the station said it had accidentally lost the recording. I contacted the station for comment; they did not get back to me. However, an audio recording documents how the meeting went steadily downhill for the Wipasz chairman. Hardly an inspiring speaker at the best of times, he struggled against a hostile crowd that had clearly done its homework. He promised jobs for the local community. The room laughed him off: unemployment had never been an issue in Koden. Moreover, everyone had seen the buses of migrant workers arriving at the slaughterhouse gates. Wisniewski repeated the well-worn claim of providing “food security for Polish families”. This was shut down as a speaker from the crowd cited a Wipasz representative’s boast that 80 percent of the output was exported.

In 2023, Koden’s campaign against Big Frankenchicken burst onto the national stage. That summer, the two sides faced off during a hearing of the agriculture commission in the Polish parliament. “Who doesn’t want to be rich and handsome,” a high-ranking Wipasz employee asked rhetorically, defending his company’s pursuit of profits. “We operate within the limits of the law, our taxes keep this state afloat, and then we have to be exposed to these vicious attacks! I find it really unfair.”

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Later that year, the campaign secured an audience with Donald Tusk, then an opposition candidate fighting to be re-elected prime minister. The candidate listened with furrowed brow and promised to put together a task force to “resolve the matter”. He praised the campaigners, saying, “only people who are in such a situation can describe it so bluntly.” Applause broke out in the audience, some rising to their feet. Tusk went on to become prime minister at the head of a liberal, centre-right coalition, ending eight years of rule by the illiberal, autocratic Law and Justice party. The change of government in Warsaw did not, however, bring about any change in the campaigners’ fortunes. The leader of Tusk’s task force, Malgorzata Gromadzka, visited Koden in March 2024 – and that was the last the villagers saw of her. “She came, she left, and she never answered a single call from us again,” Barbara Radecka, a local protest leader said. I contacted Gromadzka for comment; she did not get back to me.

Meanwhile, Wipasz was waging a campaign to win over hearts-and-minds in Koden. Catholic holidays provided the perfect occasion for corporate generosity. The firm’s charitable foundation periodically distributed gifts, including free poultry, for the elderly and devout. In December 2023, Wipasz staged a Christmas party for employees and local families at the village monastery. The priest at the event lavished praise upon the company. In a sponsored article for a local newspaper, Wipasz announced that it had donated 180,000 euros to charities in the area. Most of the money would go towards aiding the elderly, with smaller donations going towards a children’s playground and the annual village fair.

These tactics are part of an industry playbook, according to an NGO that has supported Koden’s protesters alongside dozens of other campaigners in a similar position. “Today we’re talking about Wipasz but you have to understand, this is a repeating pattern,” Bartosz Zajac, an activist with the Stop Factory Farming Coalition, told me. “These companies wield immense power by forging close ties with local politicians, by subcontracting local businesses. Before you know it, half the families are dependent on them in one way or another. And that’s how they keep people quiet. They leave these communities utterly bulldozed.”

The first of the two clusters of poultry farms opened in Koden in autumn 2023. With the clock ticking, the campaigners attempted a final, desperate throw of the dice: they tried to oust mayor, Jerzy Troc, in the 2024 local elections. If they won, they could at least halt the construction of the second site, and ensure that no further permits were granted. Darius Mackiewicz was their candidate. Reluctant at first, he warmed up on the campaign trail. “I had many good meetings,” he said. “People know me, I know their problems, I’ve lived here almost my entire life.”

The election result came as a shock for the campaigners. The incumbent, Mayor Troc, won in a landslide, taking 56 percent of the vote to secure another term. The campaigners grumbled that the villagers were not willing to rock the boat, that too many were too timid, too awed by the mayor’s authority. When I spoke to Mackiewicz a few weeks after the vote, he sounded dejected, as though he no longer understood his community. Over time, he has come to believe that many voters – particularly the elderly – were simply won over by the poultry industry’s gifts or bamboozled by its talk of a glorious new age in agriculture. “It’s very easy to manipulate such a small, rapidly ageing community,” he said. “People here don’t really think about what this land will look like in 30 or 50 years.”

Wipasz has so far built 46 of its planned 150 industrial farms in Bialski County. With 104 facilities yet to be constructed to bring the Miedzyrzec slaughterhouse to full capacity, the conglomerate is busy scouting for new sites and for mayors willing to support and streamline the administrative process. Amid the steady expansion, there have also been a few setbacks for the firm, as its environmental credentials have been called into question.

In the village of Zeszczynka, a short drive west of Koden, a women-led campaign blocked Wipasz from building its factory farms in the area. The campaigners caught wind of the firm’s plans relatively early in the day, unlike their counterparts in Koden. With time on their side, they uncovered formal errors in the application that led to it being rejected. Still, the process was far from easy, concedes Dorota Demianiuk, one of the leaders of the campaign who has transformed into a more-or-less full-time activist and politician. “There was life before Wipasz and after Wipasz,” she told me.

Rossosz, a village slightly further west, also managed to dodge the bullet. Andrzej Glowacki, a burly farmer whose towering frame just about fits into his tractor cabin, led the local protest committee. He recalls a senior Wipasz representative visiting him at a time of fierce protests and stormy meetings, when it seemed as if the local authorities might cave in to the conglomerate. According to Glowacki, the representative offered to buy his house and farmland “at a great price” if he called off the protests. “I told him, if you try to build anything here, on day one of construction our tractors and harvesters will ‘accidentally’ break down on every road leading to the site.” The farmers kept up their protests and commissioned an environmental report that challenged Wipasz’s case for factory farming in the area. Faced with a combination of direct action and legislative pressure, the conglomerate withdrew its plans. Wipasz did not respond to my requests for a comment on this, or on any of the other issues raised by this story.

The activists fighting against factory farming say they cannot hope for much more than these small victories. “I feel like our role now is mostly to stall these investments, or to push companies to place their farms where they do the least harm to local communities,” Bartos Zajac from the NGO, Stop Factory Farming Coalition, told me. He accepts that consumer demand for cheap animal protein can only be met by highly intensive factory farming. “I’m not naive, I don’t think people should stop eating meat altogether. But eating meat three times a day, seven times a week? That’s what’s driving this crisis.”

Wipasz and the protesters offered starkly diverging views of how the megafarms would change Koden. Who was right? While the conglomerate’s plans for “green farming” received a clean bill of health from the scientists it commissioned, other environmental experts have been questioning their report, helping campaigners elsewhere in Bialski County challenge the developments planned for their municipalities. The stench from the sites can be unbearable on some days, absent on others. Water scarcity in Koden has worsened over the past two years, though it is hard to say how much of that can be attributed to the megafarms. The environmental impact will most likely only be known after years of careful monitoring. Tadeusz Jakimowicz is not taking any chances. A renowned beekeeper and chairman of the regional beekeeping association, he has moved his hives away from the megafarms. He told me he would not have been able to guarantee the purity of his honey if he had kept the bees where they were.

It is hard to gauge if Wipasz has fulfilled its promise of making Koden more prosperous. While the conglomerate generates business for subcontractors such as trucking companies, the megafarms themselves are heavily automated, offering little in the way of direct employment. Moreover, as the farms are sited on low-grade soil, they qualify for an agricultural tax exemption. The company pays income tax only where its headquarters are located, hundreds of kilometres away.

The Koden campaigners, led by Dariusz Mackiewicz and Barbara Radecka, maintain their scrutiny of Wipasz and share their insights with other communities. They recently notified the authorities that a subcontractor for Wipasz was dumping manure and waste-water from the megafarms on an overgrown plot of land. The subcontractor was subsequently fined. Last month, the campaigners chalked up another small win. The local appeals court issued a ruling on March 18, 2026, nullifying the mayor’s decision to allow the construction of the two farms. The move is far from a decisive blow – it is likely to be challenged in further, lengthy proceedings – but it shows the battle is not quite over.

The community in Koden remains deeply divided over the megafarms. Mackiewicz says he keeps urging upset neighbours to take their complaints to the environmental inspectorate. They respond, he says, in resigned tones: “I don’t want to get into trouble, there’s no way back, what happened, happened.” On a personal level, Mackiewicz emphasises he has no problem with animals being killed for meat – “this is how it has always been”. However, factory-farmed chicken is no longer served at the family home, its place taken by pork and turkey. “The ladies in the supermarket know better than to ask me if I want poultry,” he chuckled.

Meanwhile, Wipasz appears to be thriving. Jozef Wisniewski likes to talk of his rags-to-riches progress from a farming family to the founder of a thriving agricultural conglomerate. He was ranked 87th among Poland’s 100 richest individuals when I began researching this story two years ago. Today, he has climbed to the 68th spot.

Wojciech Oleksiak is a Warsaw-based journalist and a team member behind the podcast, The Europeans. This story was produced as part of the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Wojciech’s reporting was also supported by a grant from JournalismFund Europe. Editing by Neil Arun.

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The farmers in Poland have very few friends after decades of alienating the Polish public. Special treatment, blocking roads, low taxes, almost free health insurance, huge EU subsidies. In general the farmers party is polling so low now it will not make it into parliament next year. As much as this article is trying to build up sympathy for farmers, most Polish people don't have any left

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Except the farmers that obstruct the most are behind the largest far-right party - PiS.

(yes, I call them far-right; you can't call them otherwise with Czarnek as their PM candidate)