EU to ban battery farming by 2012

[Dartzap]

Beeb

Campaign against chicken cruelty
By Jeremy Cooke
Rural affairs correspondent, BBC News

The government has confirmed it is to press ahead with the implementation of an EU regulation outlawing the production of battery-farmed eggs by 2012, despite pressure from farmers. But what is life really like for hens kept in such cramped conditions in the push for profits?

For years battery cage systems have been a key target of those who campaign against cruelty in farming.

For them, keeping thousands of chickens in small cages with each one allocated a space the area of a piece of A4 paper is simply unacceptable.

Certainly, when I visited a battery egg production unit in Cheshire it was a striking experience.

In each huge dimly-lit shed there were some 24,000 chickens. They were in small wire cages. There were six birds in each cage. The cages stacked five tiers high.

With automated belts delivering food and removing eggs and waste it easy to see why this system is often described as "factory farming".

There is no facility for the birds to scratch or perch or do anything other than feed, drink and lay eggs.

'Cramped and dismal'

But I was struck at how clean the facility was. The overwhelming smell I was expecting was not there. The condition of the chickens was also better than I'd anticipated.

Still there's no getting over the fact that the conditions for the chickens were cramped and dismal.

For years the European Union has agreed that the battery system must be banned. They've set a deadline of 2012.

But many farmers in the UK had hoped, and believed, that the timetable would slip and that the whole issue would be postponed.

But the Secretary of State for Agriculture and Food takes a different view. He's telling farmers that, in four years' time, battery cages will be outlawed.

"There have been some people who have been arguing that we should delay the implementation of that ban but it is not a view that I share. I think the change is long overdue and one which the public supports," he said.

Price rise

There seems little doubt that increasingly welfare-conscious consumers will agree with Mr Benn.

But for many others the banning of battery farming could mean an unwelcome increase in the price of eggs.

One of our leading supermarkets sells battery eggs at 73p for half a dozen. Free range eggs go for £1.28.

So what's so special about free range? Well the free range unit I visited was very different to the cage system. The birds are housed in a huge barn, but allowed out through pop-holes onto nearby fields.

It is still large-scale food production but seeing chickens outdoors left me in no doubt that welfare standards are higher when hens can scratch and perch and exhibit basic, instinctive behaviour.

So the question is one of a balance between welfare and cost. The government has decided that - in egg production at least - welfare is of increasing importance.

Well, that sort of ruins the whole point of Fernley Wittingstalls little campaign....

[Punarbhava]

I don't recognize the term 'battery farming', but the article also refers to 'factory farming', which I know from the pork industry in the US and Canada can really harm the environment and make everyone around them very unhappy.

In the mass 'factory' pork farms, thousands of pigs are kept in caged pens, etc.. The shit and piss they produce goes through slots in a grated floor and into large pipes. The pipes feed out into large lakes. However, the lakes fill relatively quickly, and so the pipes go another place too. I might add, the shit-puddle seeps into the ground through the porous clay barrier of the man-made lake quite easily apparently, and some farmers unfortunate enough to have one of those factories for a neighbor have complained about ruined soil and such. And that's to say nothing of what happens when there's heavy rain or a hurricane or something like that, and the lake floods. Often the pig-shit river can sludge downhill for a mile or two, and more often than that all the animals in the factory die because the operators don't seem to find it necessary to move them out of harm's way. There's a documentary out-- released awhile ago actually-- with some pretty damning footage of just that, as well as pretty much everything else I'm talking about. "The Nature of Things", it's called. Er, actually it's a tv-show segment. Either way, here's the link.

In addition to the pipes filling the lakes, much waste is sprayed into the air with giant hose/sprinklers. Technically they're "watering the crops", but the video I've seen (part 3 mainly, in the link above) shows the sprayers operating in high winds and the shit (literally) blowing miles downwind. And the stench is ridiculous. People can't go outside on hot days or any day they're downwind of the factory because of the 'unimaginable' shit-smell. There's even something about a disease caused by or associated with the factories somehow, but I don't remember details.

Apparently the reason the industry gets away with all it does is because of lax standards on farmland for waste disposal and other farm-type miscellany. Big money has exploited rules meant for small independent farmers who generally keep a full spectrum of crops and animals in a balanced self-sustaining way, building huge factories to exploit every step of the process in the way producing the biggest profit margin. It's a natural step for those companies involved, but-- according to above tv segment, at least, and I agree-- it needs at the very least some regulation, 'cause it looks to be fucking up the environment.

Some say all farms should be self-sustaining in the way the smaller farms are, in balance with nature; that we could still produce all the necessary goods. Farmers would use all the latest technology, of course, but in a more natural environment than the big factories. That seems to be the direction the EU is going for chicken farming.

I didn't really think there were many factory farms in the EU to begin with, though. I had always heard most stuff is local and relatively small-scale. I once read (I think on a food-related forum) vegetables aren't likely to have come from more than 400 miles away, or somesuch.

[loomer]

Aw, damn. Now where am I going to buy my taste of suffering from?

[DarkSilver]

I actually agree with the idea - battery farming, while maybe terrible efficient, also is unnecessarily cruel to the chickens. Part of the reason I buy my eggs certified organic and cageless (most often I tend to buy local, there's quiet a few "road side" egg sellers who sell, what's termed back home, "yard eggs" - brown chicken eggs. )

[Falkenhorst]

There's even something about a disease caused by or associated with the factories somehow, but I don't remember details.

I remember reading in an article in MAXIM how when the slurry ponds overflow and a large amount of it gets into rivers and littoral waterways it unbalances the ecosystem by causing this organism called Pfisteria to multiply exponentially causing mass fish kills and bringing deltrious health effects on swimmers and fishermen.

[Admiral Valdemar]

There's even something about a disease caused by or associated with the factories somehow, but I don't remember details.

I remember reading in an article in MAXIM how when the slurry ponds overflow and a large amount of it gets into rivers and littoral waterways it unbalances the ecosystem by causing this organism called Pfisteria to multiply exponentially causing mass fish kills and bringing deltrious health effects on swimmers and fishermen.

Eutrophication will happen with normal farming as well, so long as enough nitrates and phosphates enter a water body and allow excess growth as one would expect when enough abundant resources are placed in a system.

Battery farming isn't as common today, but I can say that catching some of Hugh's Chicken Run made me think and today I got some Quorn "chicken" goujons to eat for the first time. I normally can't stand Mr. I'll-eat-roadkill-and-placentas, I far prefer Heston Blumenthal and his amazing chemistry based cooking. He does, however, raise good points I can't ignore. We pay far too little for what we eat, and maybe the rising food prices to rival times past will make us think again.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

From what I have read the in Animal Welfare literature at my university, the United States seems pretty consistently to lag behind Europe in these types of legislation. I think the average chicken in the USA has about 60 square inches of space, but in Europe from 07-012, Europe was even doubling that as well as phasing out the bare-wire cages.

[Rye]

Great news, those sorts of places are mentally damaging to experience as a human being, let alone as a chicken in those conditions. We eat too much meat anyway, I can't see any ethical problem in either outlawing battery farming or raising the price of meat and other animal products to deal with the economic repercussions of that.

[aerius]

Damnit, this could spell the end of Toonie Tuesday at KFC!