The price of eggs
my fears of bird flu and why eggs need to be seen as a luxury for the sake of farming and poultry
Allen and Page layers pellets 20kg bag - £18.99
Burly Bed chopped straw compressed bale - £8.25
Food grade diatomaceous earth powder 5 LITRES - £29.50
Redstone grit - 2.5kg - £2.69
I thought I’d write the above list to just be honest about how much its costs me to look after my hens. I don’t mind the cost, its my choice to keep them and I’d imagine that they still cost less than the monthly expense of a pedigree dog that is fed on organic, venison. What does annoy me though, is the expectation that eggs should be a cheap item to buy. I had several mocking comments from an honesty box I put out one weekend asking £3 for half a dozen eggs. To me the eggs my girls lay are objects of still life Faberge. Honestly they should have been bloody £5 quid a box. I’d love to be like Liz Hurley and set up Parkinson Organic, does anyone remember the Hurley Organic days?
You can perhaps imagine the face I gave at comments from a passer by about them being far cheaper in the village shop. By the end of the day with none sold, I thought sod this, I’d rather gift them to people I love and like than sell them at a loss, they are too beautiful to even be on display! I then saw that 6 Clarence Court eggs in Waitrose had a price tag of £4.35.
But is that how much a box of eggs should be? Certainly, I think, considering its the winter. We have long forgotten the natural rhythms of nature.
Before the advent of artificial lighting, that today makes all commercial hens think that they are living in some sort of endless springtime of long daytime working hours, eggs in the winter would often be those from pickled jars. Preserved from summer wisely, as hens especially those of old pure breeds, demand breaks from laying their energy draining eggs. Just like wild female birds, hens lay most of their eggs naturally between March and September. We no longer at large, see eggs as a luxury thanks to the Supermarket cathedrals of the small farmer killing price crunches but they most certainly should be respected as a luxury.
The egg as a finished product is the most perfect piece of work and design, clean and polished and perfectly presented in a cardboard egg box that evokes a mystical farmyard air of origin. What a mystical ploy this green lights, it is perhaps what could be considered to be the most greenwashed result of todays intensive mega farms.
As a child, I loved the egg section of Safeway and I studied the labels, they probably helped me to read far more than the education at school of the Biff and Chipp books.
Eggs from hens reared in spacious barns, Eggs from Free range hens allowed to wonder at liberty from dawn until dusk, Eggs from Caged hens. Organic eggs from free range hens fed an organic diet.
To be clear the rest of this piece, I take no pleasure in writing. I want to be a supporter of small British farming. The problem is that this image and idea have been taken by giant conglomerates and greenwashed to suit profit, harming both standards of animal welfare and pushing the good farmers who wish to ensure high standards to breaking point. We should have the best standards of farm animal welfare on a global stage of excellence but unfortunately I cannot state this.
Back in my childhood egg box reading days of 1996 when things were not arguably as bad as they are today for the commercial laying hen, the occasional farm investigation did sometimes reach channel 5 news or Tonight with Trevor McDonald, exposing at the time, but quickly forgotten, especially with assurances from the now on its knees in terms of exposed reputation, RSPCA Freedom food scheme.
Its constantly exposed failures in the failure of monitoring and enforcing the welfare at its endorsed industrial sized farms, slaughter houses and animal transportation has recently seen both Chris Packham and Caroline Lucas resign from being the Charities presidents.
Much of this exposing footage today, comes to light due to the arguably unhelpfully divisive movement of militant veganism whose positions demands such a black and white view of farming that I cannot wholeheartedly support. After all this is the writer who watches and likes to celebrate The Two Fat Ladies! An egg can and should be a trusted and wonderful thing to eat, alas those in supermarkets simply don’t hold such merits on the whole.
Horrific scenes have been secretly filmed again and again on different farms, contracted to different suppliers, almost all under RSPCA assurances. Of course anyone with a vendetta against animal agriculture could edit a film of an egg barn housing of what is usually, a scene of some 30 thousand jostling hens per flock to look pretty grim. Hens simply cannot cope harmoniously in such large flock numbers that most free range farms allow them to be. Absent of any cockerels to calm the hens hormones, the hens quickly begin to feather peck and become aggressive as they attempt to form their natural pecking orders.
Organic standards at least under the Soil Association scheme give some assurances against this their maximum flock sizes per hen house stand at two thousand birds.
As someone who knows poultry, even the best farm could be made to look unethical if broken into at night when the hens naturally roost very closely together and look quite demure. What cannot be excused in the investigations of late is the shocking volume of not just dead hens within the living but the number of clearly rotting hens amongst them too. The use of drones is also helping to shine a light on the warehouse like scale of what industrial free range egg units now resemble, with very few birds seen even accessing the outside.
Animal Justice Project egg investigation 2024
And this week, news of avian flu, the dark shadow that so far this year has been slightly less of a threat, at least here in the Uk has suddenly made sinister egg farm culling headlines. Over in America, where most hens are kept inside in cages anyway, bird flu culls of their commercial flocks have resulted in eggs reaching prices of $10, The culling of huge flocks has left the industry struggling to replenish itself so there are no doubt scientists trying to clone a bird flu resistant hen in haste, such is the modern brain and mind of man.
BIRD FLU STRIKES UK EGG FARM JANUARY 2024
And now the Uk’s largest and most modern egg laying site in the country, with more than a million birds are now expected to have its flocks culled in an attempt to prevent quite bafflingly further spread.
Concerns were first raised in the barn egg unit at Griffiths Family Farms – part of Oaklands Farm Eggs – on Saturday (18 January), affecting one flock within a shed at the company’s production site near Wem in north Shropshire.
While the disease was contained to this single shed of the 24 units on site, none of the birds had access to the outside, the eggs laid within it would have been either classed as barn or enriched cage eggs. According to the firm’s website, the firm packs more than 1bn eggs a year, from its own flock of 2.5 million birds and another 1 million contracted birds, with an annual turnover of around £75m. Its hardly a Wallace and Gromit, chicken run Mrs Tweedy plotting chicken pie machine setup.
The Animal and Plant Health Agency is expected to enforce the culling of all the flocks on site adding up to the million birds stated, a baffling stance given that bird flu is no longer a new disease to the uk and clearly and arguably an endemic disease to be expected to rear its head within intensive farming, easily passing through the bodies of genetically identical poor, knackered and doomed innocents.
The culling will be happening probably as I am typing using carbon dioxide possibly who knows how do you in a bio secure manner kill such a large number of birds . Before this major outbreak, farms in Lincolnshire, East Yorkshire and Norfolk have all had farms report bird flu resulting in culls and lockdowns of birds.
Whilst the media won’t steer thoughts of factory farms being the cause of such diseases, this time the finger cannot be pointed at wild birds, the bird flu came from within, as not one hen in that infected barn ever stepped a claw outside.
And so now, I’m not only kept awake at night with concern for my own birds, owing to hearing recently rehabilitated and dangerously bold foxes in the woods but I fear the DEFRA aliens appearing in white coats willingly wanting to gas my rare breed dear ones in their governmental will of protecting intensive, profit making industrial farming at all costs which very much involves a stance of blaming the backyard poultry keeper. Again and again, bird flu has been blamed on those of us gripping onto self sufficiency in this suffocating, disconnected modern age and also onto wild birds. This time though, the invisible fox was already in the stressed and pushed to the brink battery hen house.
Is there any hope then, any eggs to be trusted at all that you can buy if you cannot keep your own birds? Yes and I’m going to tell you about this unique farm in my next substack. Thank you for reading.
Thank you Arthur for setting this out so clearly.
This obsession with cheapness makes me sad. Back in the post war years my mum told me that the food budget was a huge part of her housekeeping bill… everything was revered and farmers were paid well for their work. Wish we could go back to this x