A council may take legal action against the owners of one of the country's biggest chicken processors following complaints from residents.

Wealden District Council has been inundated with complaints about a foul smell coming from Woodside Farm, in Polegate, which is home to thousands of birds destined for supermarkets and food wholesalers.

Grampian Country Chickens, which runs the farm, says everything has been done to tackle the problem and claims only major redevelopment of the site will have any further effect. Such action would jeapordise up to 400 jobs because of the scale of the costs involved, Grampian bosses say.

Council officers are meeting with solicitors to find a way forward and the authority's environmental services and public protection committee will meet next week to consider serving an abatement notice on the farm.

Councillors will hear how a consultant was sent to the farm following dozens of complaints over smells coming from the unit.

The expert found evidence of an "odour nuisance" near homes at Brownings, Polegate, and to a lesser extent in Nightingale Place and Cliff Coombe.

It was found that the smell was being caused by poor ventilation in some chicken sheds.

The consultant said: "At present, best practicable means are not being applied because the environmental conditions within some of the sheds does not result in a minimum odour generation and vertical discharge fans have not been installed."

The findings have been slammed by Lionel Halls, Southern region agricultural operations manager for Grampian.

He said: "It seems unlikely that we are going to be able to improve our output of odour by means of management and the only real option for us is to remove the current fan shafts and replace them with ones that will allow unrestricted vertical discharge."

Mr Halls said the project could cost his company as much as £120,000 without necessarily providing a long-term solution to the problem and possibly casting the future of the farm into doubt.

He said: "Be under no illusions as to the consequences on the local economy should this farm be forced to close.

"This farm represents ten per cent of the production at our Uckfield processing plant and its closure would genuinely put more than 400 jobs at risk."

Representatives of the company plan to attend next week's meeting, which takes place in Hailsham on November 7, from 10am.