our first story today examines the booming pastured eggs sector Australian state governments have agreed that the classification free-range will allow up to 10,000 hens to the hectare but it's left a lot of smaller egg producers out in the cold so a growing number of going further than free-range by making sure their chickens always have fresh pasture South Australian based reporter Pru Adams reports on the battle over the term free-range and the trend towards pastured eggs you farming doesn't get much more idyllic than this pre-dawn at barmy Byron Bay and the trucks are about to be let out of their purpose-built Caravan to spend another day pecking on pasture there's nothing better than 350 I saw Browns running around on fresh green pasture they're beside themselves they you know they're that happy so to showcase to the consumer and and all our customers that come on site we wouldn't never going to do anything else other than raise our chickens on Russia 2,000 kilometers south on the other side of a slice of water called Backstairs passage you come to Kangaroo Island here Graham and Cathy Barrett are doing the daily egg collection from their homemade mobile truck house they run chickens in rotation with beef cattle and prime lamb Chuck's are actually very hard on posture they they over graze it very quickly that's why we keep moving the sheds around it looks like it's short so we keep graze it down with the cattle of a sheep and then the Chuck's follow behind back again on the mainland at Keith's near the sa Vic Borden another egg Enterprise with a similar approach here bill hood is doing his regular Monday morning move pulling the Chuck Caravan along another 25 meters to put the hens in lush and loosen across the country from Margaret River in the West to Etherton in the north there are now hundreds of these small-scale free-range egg farms that rely on mobile housing so chickens can always have fresh green feed those who farm this way say the eggs are more than just free-range increasingly they're referring to their product as pastured or pasture-raised eggs as we learn more about pastured poultry in the benefit for land and all of those types of things that was an absolute no-brainer that's where we wanted to go pastured egg production means that the hens are raised outdoors that they have free and open access to the paddocks and most importantly that they are at stocking densities that always allow for access to forage and grazing so by that I mean that there's always pasture on the ground that the pasture is managed so that it's not a dirt lot that the hens are out there and they can actually eat the grass and obviously they love it small-scale pastured product has become such a thing that Queensland based Lima Koska has built a business around it an animal welfare specialist and pig farmer she has her own licensing and accreditation company called proof an acronym for pasture-raised on open fields proof is an organization that supports farmers that are producing their livestock in under pastured conditions as opposed to just free-range they actually farm their their animals in a much more old-fashioned type of system where the animals actually do range outside usually in mobile systems in paddock rotations mainly in that in the hello girls there are 20 members of proof nationally half of them AG producers the other half growing out pastured pork members pay a licensing fee and have to stick to a stringent code of conduct with regards to animal welfare they're subject to short notice audits and can access training and advice the operations manager at the farm byron bay johnson hunter is debating whether to sign up yeah we're going to consider partnering with Lee I think it's a perfect example for her to showcase what the proof standards are here we're going to talk to her and see see what we can do together but it's just awesome for people like her to be able to put a standard out there that is tangible for the consumer to research and then they make the choice about what what what egg or more meat product they want the byron bay farm is a showcase for small-scale animal and food production which they say is ethical and sustainable with thousands of visitors every year and a cafe on site there is a ready market for their pastured free-range eggs it's an expensive and labor-intensive way to farm some producers have to roll out temporary electric fencing before they move their chicken houses each week the egg collection is not automated as it is in the large-scale commercial sheds and fewer eggs are collected partly because the chickens sometimes lay away from their boxes but also because inconsistent weather and the threat of predators can lower the lay rate adding to the expense in many cases Maremma guardian dogs are employed to protect the free roaming hens yeah we'd have my three main problems here is the wedge style Eagles the feral cats and then the crows get a bit smart for us every now and then too and we wouldn't be doing it without the Maremma dogs you have to have dogs and good fences to keep the Chuck's closer for the dogs to actually look after them there are an extraordinary animal obviously we couldn't do what we do without them with no fences or nothing we've got foxes here and Eagles and the dogs do a very good job of dealing with that eggs farmed this way are up to four times the price of caged chicken eggs retailing it between six and twelve dollars a dozen but according to the producers landline spoke with there is still an insatiable demand we can't meet the develop present we cannot supply enough you've got always been the case yes we've never advertised anywhere it's always just word of mouth let's spread out markets and we just can't keep up we have a waiting list Graham and Cathy Barrett were among the first to operate a free-range egg business with movable truck houses back in 1999 when they started there wasn't much information around and there certainly weren't any prefabricated mobile units so Graham made up his own they started with 300 hens and expanded slowly applying biodynamic principles so placing a strong emphasis on healthy soil and pasture and using only feed grain that is grown without chemicals katham Springs now runs 4,000 layers in four mobile units and collects 2,000 to 2,500 eggs a day depending on the season they've always refer to themselves as being free-range egg producers but feel recent changes to that term have watered down its value well this is the sort of operation you might imagine when you buy eggs that are labeled free-range the reality has often been quite different and there hasn't been a universally accepted definition of that term free-range almost six years ago a group of South Australian egg producers including the bearers started agitating for clarity at a state level the issue soon progressed to the national stage and in April this year Consumer Affairs ministers from the Commonwealth state and territories all came to a consensus on a new free-range standard but it's pretty fair to say many of the smaller producers are still not happy the new information standard will require eggs labeled as free-range to have been laid by chickens that had meaningful and regular access to the outdoors and for them to have been stocked at no more than 10,000 hens per hectare that's one chicken per square meter the egg farmers that stock fewer chickens had lobbied hard for the approved density to be no more than 1500 hens per hectare we spent a lot of time on phones sending emails talking to politicians showing politicians around just trying to get some clarity with what's going on and try and say that there are two different systems there's the the low of anybody's stocking at fifteen hundred hens a hectare or less and then anything above that really needs to be called something else but recovery what it would be much better in the pasture yeah the owner of the proof licensing program says the big industry players have taken the marketing advantage in using the free-range term they fought hard for the definition for free-range so in my opinion they stole it from those that developed it and deserve to use it one of the larger commercial producers who pushed for free-range to be defined at the higher density was Dion and dari who owns days eggs currently we have four sheds over 30,000 bird capacity so we're running 120,000 birds and just about to put shed five in and we have planned for six sheds approved this is free-range egg production at ten thousand chickens per hectare with fixed sheds any vegetation is eaten out pretty quickly and while the birds are free to come and go as they like Wow their pillow tires to feed and water is kept inside and the trucks mostly opted to stay in the comfort of their climate-controlled home they go where they're comfortable and if they want to go outside they will its about midday now so more birds will come inside around the middle of the day Dion and dari and his wife Anne started days eggs in the late 80s back then they're laying hens were kept in cages and mr. and re maintains that is still best for the birds welfare and productivity there are several arguments mounted against free-range production the trucks don't lay as many eggs over their lifetime there is more landmass needed disease can be spread between wild birds and free-roaming chickens and there is the issue of predators targeting the outdoor Chuck's as an example when a hawk flies overhead the chickens scurry to the safety of their shed for all these reasons days eggs was only pushed down the free-range path because consumers demanded it that said Dion and Ari is pleased he'll be allowed to stock at ten thousand to the hectare not be limited to 1500 we had already committed to large volume production we were producing eggs and selling those eggs and it would have meant that if the decision had to go on the other way the other everyday consumer would have been paying a heck of a lot more for free-range eggs and most consumers would not been able to afford to buy them so that that would have been something that would have been really detrimental to the general national inventory of eggs and it would have created shortages even worse than what we're probably seeing now also a director of egg farmers Australia a body purporting to represent the interest of egg producers mr. and diary' takes issue with the term pastured eggs well past you the songs it's not giving the perception that that the birds are out there eating grass and that's where the eggs coming from the reason they're in grass is they're scratching around they'll pick a grass and pull it to pieces and ingest some of it but there's no nutritional benefit that a chicken couldn't survive on grass it would actually die and or it won't lay eggs and it's a point that pastured egg producers dispute while a supplied grain mix makes up the bulk of the trucks food intake they say the chickens do eat grass they eat a lot of grass especially the first couple of days we move them onto fresh pasture we see it they they they want to get into that clover straightaway they're attracted to that we see just under a third drop in consumption on our pelletized feed when we move on to fresh pasture so for the first couple of days they are busy chasing bugs and and eating grass all they definitely eat the grass they have of the pasture down pretty hard sometimes it's that's what we have to keep them moving and you notice that in the egg production if they're eating the grass they're on good good pasture that the egg production really increases there has long been internal conflict within the AG industry between the big commercial players and the niche marketers between those that believe chucks are best kept caged and others who want them to be free to roam and scratch the federal treasury has been tasked with drawing up the new free range information legislation and it's understood it'll be law within 12 months for the phasing in period of another year or so but if the definition was designed to bring consensus among producers well clearly it hasn't I think it's condemned free-range to being just a supermarket term it for some reason the powers that be have decided that the supermarkets and the and the the corporate giants were more deserving of the term free-range than our little family farms and in the process they've installed destroyed the integrity of the term free-range along with the terms pastured or pasture-raised that are appearing on cartons within the next two years it will become compulsory for producers to spell out the hen stocking density - I'm not fearful at all because the one of the largest selling brands of free-range eggs in Australia has had ten thousand on their carton for almost four years and hat and it is still now the largest selling brand in Australia so there's no question that there will be people that might make that switch but there are also people that will go the other way and think well why am i paying that when I can actually get a cheaper product you need to get a level playing field for consumers to be able to compare and the hectare ratio seems to be the one that that we're getting them to understand it's a tricky one but because I've know plenty of people in the city who have asked me what is a hectare so we haven't quite got bad across God's earth eggs were hold a nice little marketing edge last year when choice magazine rated them the top producer as defined by their lo hen density with no real barrier fences bill and sells chickens as they like to call them are stocked at less than 10 to the hectare a thousand times sparsa than the new information standard will allow not that they think all producers should farm the way that they do now I would I wouldn't say so I think there's room for all that all the different types of production of eggs yeah I don't know I don't think so and I don't think it's affordable for everybody to eight backyard eggs it's perhaps not every farmers dream job to be a pashtun free-range truck egg producer um and and I don't know whether we would be able to produce enough eggs in this system to be able to print feed the world but of this way five years ago if he said I'd be a truck farmer I would and was taking it too seriously and I was said by why yeah yeah sorry no I die I die I think that there's room for everybody to do what they do ah
