Ban on battery hans lagging after swine ban

Feed Processing Articles >> Oceania

Sow crates are going but life for our more than three million battery hens doesn't look like improving any time soon. Battery cages are banned in Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands as the European Union moves to `enriched cages', but Germany is to ban even those. New Zealand standards are lagging behind. Sarah Harvey takes a look at barn egg farming.

Barn hen farming is not some sort of chicken utopia where the ladies spend all day dust-bathing or scratching for feed in the gentle breeze – but it has to be a better life than 13 months in a cage.

When we enter one of the 14 sheds on the property of Henergy, near Masterton, there is a flap of wings and quiet cooing. The hens, despite there being about 6000 of them in the shed, look healthy and can move around freely. They have nest boxes, a large area where they can dust-bathe and a system that keeps the temperature just so.

Barn farming of layer hens is relatively new to New Zealand but is being hailed by organisations including the SPCA as the way to get rid of cages while still producing enough eggs to satisfy our needs.

The system allows hens to roam free within a barn, but not outside. The argument is that the nutrients they eat can be much better controlled when the hens are in a controlled environment, and that without shelter, hens in free range farms will not go outside anyway. And we need a lot of eggs. Fresh eggs cannot be imported, so we rely on the nation's roughly 3.5 million hens to lay the 968 million eggs we consume annually. Of those hens, more than 3 million are in cages.

About 60 per cent of the eggs laid every year will be sold at the supermarket. The other 40 per cent will be used by industry (caterers, restaurants etc). Surveys have shown that about 71 per cent of consumers oppose battery farming but the sheer weight of numbers and the lower cost mean battery-hen eggs account for 82 per cent of supermarket sales.

The Layer Hen Welfare Code, which came into effect in 2004, is currently under review by the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee, a government body. The code is expected to come up for public consultation before the end of the year.

Hans Kriek, the director of national animal rights organisation Safe, said that when the welfare code was first written, in 2004, battery cages were found to breach the Animal Welfare Act.

He said that battery cages would ideally have been phased out altogether but because most farmers were using them at the time, the review was held off until this year.

"We have this situation where we have battery hens in cages, despite the Animal Welfare Act saying they must be able to express their normal behaviour, which they obviously can't do in a cage," Kriek said.

But aside from all the legal and political developments, consumers are clearly making their own decisions, he said

In the past year, the cage-free sector has grown by about 40 per cent. Henergy alone has grown by about 60 per cent.

Henergy owner Graeme Napier was a sheep farmer in the Wairarapa until 1995 when he bought an old battery hen farm on the outskirts of Masterton and transformed it into New Zealand's first barn-egg farm.

There are now about 86,000 hens at Henergy and the company plans to expand.

It has about 30 staff on the farm and another 22 in sales and marketing, compared to just one fulltime and two part-time staff members at the beginning.

Henergy was the first company to earn a "blue tick" from the SPCA – evidence that the company's products had been audited for animal-welfare compliance.

SPCA national chief executive Robyn Kippenberger says the system allows consumers to easily make informed choices.

"Its not about biodynamics or organics or anything like that – it's simply animal welfare." Four producers, two of which are barn producers and two free-range, have now qualified for the blue tick.

Kippenberger, however, has few hopes that the lot of New Zealand hens is about to improve as she says it will be up to the industry to get more free-range or barn-farmed eggs on to the market.

And the industry has a captive audience, most of whom are buying cage eggs. She says the idea of "enriched cages" – the most likely reform the government will make to the welfare code – is laughable.

Enriched cages are larger than standard battery cages and must have a nesting box and an area of turf. However, Kippenberger joked that hens in enriched cages would have to take turns at sharing the nesting box and would need a roster when it came to stretching their wings or sitting on the turf area.

Kriek believed New Zealanders would not be happy with enriched cages, despite the influence of the European example. "It is going to be completely unacceptable to consumers... it is just another battery hen cage," he said.

In a move that signals some hope to animal welfare activists, international supermarket chain Coles recently announced that its Australia stores would cut the prices of free-range egg brands in order to persuade customers to switch from caged eggs.

Coles also announced it will phase out its own brand of caged eggs by 2013.

Kippenberger said she hoped our industry would also see the benefits of change.

"I would be hopeful that the companies that are cage-farming birds at the moment will be looking over to barn or free-range – the market certainly is asking for that."

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