How many adults in the UK currently own a chicken?

For our purposes will assume an adult is anyone over the age of 16. From memory the population of the UK is around 61m. I think about 1/5 of the population will be under 16 so there should be roughly 48m adults in the UK.

I personally consume about 1 chicken per fortnight or 26 chickens per year.

As I do my shopping fortnightly and eat my chicken at some point during that time I have the chicken stored in my freezer or fridge on average for around a week or so.

This means for a typical year I will own a chicken for 26 weeks in total. At other points in the week I will be eating or gestating the bird but will own uneaten poultry for half the year give or take.

So if we take me as the sample and extrapolate to the rest of the UK adult population in any given year we get:

48m (population/2 (half the year) = 24

I estimate somewhere in the order of 24m adults in the UK currently own a chicken.