As we have discovered as part of our cage free campaign, there is no system in Australia to ensure that free range or barn laid eggs actually are what they say they are, and that the conditions in these farms are close to what we would assume. As a free range egg producer points out in this article from today's Sunday Age, not all free range eggs come from chooks which go outside to scratch in the dirt and forage for invertebrates.
But the Australian Federal government has this year been looking into this problem, so it is certain that in the months or years to come an Australian Standard for free range or cage free egg production will be established. In the mean time, it seems that there are typically only 5 in every 6 eggs sold as free range which actually come from a free range farm. And this is not even the first time this has been reported, a study less than five years ago found that it was about 1.5 in every dozen eggs. Now with increased consumer demand there are even fewer eggs being sold as free range which meet the ideal.
You can do something about this! Contact your state and federal members of parliament, as well as the Vic Minister for Primary Industries
Peter Batchelor, and the federal Minister for Agriculture
Tony Burke and demand that they get this process moving so that consumers can have some idea what's inside a carton of eggs if they choose to buy it.
Egg group figures run foul of free-range claimsKELLY BURKE
September 6, 2009
ONE in six free-range eggs is not what it seems.
An analysis of data provided by the egg-producing industry has confirmed what most consumers have suspected for some time: it is doubtful that enough free-range layer hens exist in Australia to produce the number of eggs labelled and sold as free-range by retailers.
In the year to January 2007, the Australian free-range flock would have had to grow by more than 37 per cent to match the increased sale of free-range eggs recorded by the Australian Egg Corporation in its annual reports.
Over that time, the number of all eggs sold in the grocery market jumped from 811 million to 971 million and the proportion of those sold as free-range jumped from 20.3 per cent to 23.4 per cent.
But at the same time the number of eggs produced in total, covering the wholesale, manufacturing and export markets as well as the grocery sector, dropped from 3 billion to 2.8 billion, and the overall flock of laying hens decreased by 6 per cent.
The total free-range flock would have had to grow from 891,000 hens in 2006 to 1.22 million to meet the Egg Corporation's free-range sales figures.
NSW Greens MP John Kaye said about 36.8 million eggs (about 16 per cent) branded as free-range must actually have been either barn or cage-laid. ''Either the industry's making up the figures as it goes along or there are dodgy producers who are getting away with calling eggs free-range when they are not,'' he said.
Dr Kaye said that with big retailers such as Woolworths reporting increased demand for free-range eggs, there was an urgent need for formal accreditation of free-range farming practices and the introduction of regulations to control labelling.
The Egg Corporation, which operates its own voluntary accreditation program, Egg Corp Assured, did not return calls.
According to its website, Egg Corp Assured uses registered third party auditors to monitor the quality of product and the integrity of labelling practices.
Tony Coote, of free-range egg producer Mulloon Creek Natural Farms, east of Canberra, said even consumers opting to buy only Egg Corp Assured-labelled eggs may not be getting what they think they've paid for because the Egg Corporation set the bar too low on what it classified as free-range.
Large ''free-range'' operators were permitted to crowd thousands of hens in giant sheds containing all the flock's needs, so very few birds ventured outside to forage anyway.
''You can't believe all the pictures you see, with birds roaming on green grass. That's just not so in many cases,'' Mr Coote said.
