It’s not as easy as you’d think to tell a good egg from a bad egg these days. Melinda Williams works out which free-range brands you can trust.
Voting with your wallet
Green Ideas believes that by choosing one of the brands below, you can have confidence that you’re supporting ethical egg production.
Ethical eggs
The pictures on the egg cartons make it look pretty good to be a free-range chicken in New Zealand. Happy brown and red hens scratching in the grass under the sun – it’s a long way from those horrifically crowded battery cages that you occasionally see on current affairs exposés. And with so many brands on offer for a range of prices, it’s getting easier and easier to make an ethical choice when it comes to eggs. Or is it…?
First, the stats: In New Zealand there are about 140 commercial egg farms, holding 3.3 million hens, which produce more than a billion eggs a year (about four-and-a-half eggs, per Kiwi, per week). The vast majority of these laying hens – over 80 per cent – are held in battery cages which restrict movement and natural behaviours, and cause stress and sometimes cannibalism. Hens classed as ‘free-range’ lay around 14 per cent of commercially produced eggs purchased in New Zealand according to the Egg Producers Federation of New Zealand, and this is growing at a rate of about one per cent a year.
However, life on the farm can be quite different from the pictures on the box for ‘free-range’ hens. Although ‘free-range’ is certainly a step up from battery cages (which have been banned in the European Union and are due to be phased out here by 2023), in some cases it’s not such a long way from ‘barn-raised’ hens that never set foot outside a shed packed with thousands of chickens, even though consumers pay a higher price for ‘free-range’ eggs. So what’s a well-intentioned egg-eater to do?
What does ‘free-range’ really mean?
“Consumers need to understand that ‘free-range’ is a marketing term, not a legal definition,” says Juliette Banks, national accreditation and marketing manager for the SPCA Blue Tick (see below). The Animal Welfare (Layer Hens) Code of Welfare 2012, which provides minimum standards for layer hen farming, has nothing to say about free-range standards other than that “barns with access to the outdoors are usually referred to as free-range systems”. There’s no minimum standard for the size and type of outdoor area, nothing about how many pop-holes (doors to the outdoors), nor any requirement around the amount of time the hens actually spend outdoors. A ‘free-range’ hen could quite easily spend its whole life indoors, never setting claw on a blade of grass.
Even roaming around in green pasture is not an ideal lifestyle for laying hens if there is no cover, says Juliette. “A chicken is not a cow. They don’t want a big, open field. They want an environment that replicates their natural environment, which is a forest. A lot of non-accredited farms don’t have a lot of trees, or the trees are around the edge of the property, which doesn’t do any good. We ask that our [Blue Tick] farmers put in lots of shade and shelter, about 20 per cent of their outdoor range, which encourages birds to go outside.”
The fact that hens keep producing eggs is no guarantee that they’re happy either, says Juliette. “Poor welfare is actually quite invisible to the untrained eye. It takes a lot for layer hens to stop laying.”
Who can you trust?
Obviously, despite the lack of clarity around the definition, eggs from ‘free-range’ hens are still ethically preferable to eggs from caged hens. However there are definitely some shady operators out there who put their own official-looking ‘free-range’ logos on their packs without anyone ever needing to check they’re doing what they say they are.
So if you want to be sure you’re choosing eggs from happy hens, you need to buy a brand that’s certified by a reputable third party auditor that assesses animal welfare. Green Ideas believes there are three schemes you can trust in New Zealand: the SPCA blue tick, AsureQual and BioGro (see below).
The SPCA scheme is specifically about animal welfare, while the other two are organic certifications that also include high standards of animal welfare in their assessments. Choosing a brand with one of these logos ensures you really are buying happy eggs.
Labels to look for
The rules are loose around using the words ‘free-range’, so to be sure, choose eggs displaying the SPCA Blue Tick, or one of the organic labels below (as these schemes are also strictly free-range).
SPCA Blue Tick
Animal welfare is at the heart of this mark, says the SPCA’s Juliette Banks. That means standards for water quality, nest boxes, perches, litter quality, number of pop-holes, food and cover. Flocks are limited to 5000 hens, with no more than nine hens per square metre. And having a head stockperson who is serious about animal welfare is crucial, says Juliette.
The SPCA Blue Tick does allow farmers to choose whether to trim hens’ beaks (at one day old) to prevent pecking injuries, and Juliette acknowledges that this is a controversial choice. The SPCA believes that on commercial farms, the pain inflicted on hens from pecking injuries is worse than the pain of beak-trimming.”[Beak-trimming] doesn’t stop hens from being able to express any of their natural behaviours. They can still pick up little bugs and preen their feathers,” says Juliette. “For people who have five or six backyard chickens, of course it’s not necessary, but on a commercial farm, it may be.” Independent auditors check Blue Tick approved farms every year, and may perform spot audits.
As well as assessing free-range flocks the SPCA also awards the Blue Tick to barn-raised hens that meet their standards, as it believes they can be just as happily kept. However they don’t allow Blue Tick barn-raised eggs to be labelled ‘free-range’.
AsureQuality Organic
AsureQuality is a state-owned enterprise that provides food safety and biosecurity inspection services to New Zealand businesses. Their organic certification means that layer hens must have access to an outdoor area “whenever weather conditions permit and whenever possible, for at least one-third of their life” and this outdoor space must be “mostly covered in vegetation and be provided with protective facilities.” All feed supplied to hens must also be organic, and the use of additives to enhance the colour of the egg yolks is banned.
Beak trimming is allowed at one day old, and flock sizes are limited to 1500 hens per flock, and six hens per square metre of deep litter indoors.
BioGro Organic
Billing itself as “New Zealand’s leading organic certifier”, BioGro is owned by the New Zealand Biological Producers and Consumers Society, a non-profit incorporated society and registered charity. They have developed their own set of organic standards that they audit farms against, and their certification process is independently audited each year by a number of accreditation and regulatory bodies from around the world.
Under the BioGro code for layer hens, all livestock must have access to outdoor runs. Beak trimming is banned, as is the use of natural and artificial colourants to enhance yolk colour. Indoor stock density must not exceed five hens per square metre of deep litter.
