The Australian Egg Corporation is still plugging away, trying to get its discredited Egg Standards Australia program up and running - but its timeline is now very short.
The AECL Board has missed every deadline set for introducing the new standard, and it doesn't look like it will meet its latest September deadline!
It will make for an interesting Annual Meeting in Sydney in November if the program isn't in operation before then.
As all egg producers know, the Scottish Agricultural College
denied claims by the Australian Egg Corporation that its research
backed Egg Corp plans for free range stocking densities to be lifted
to 20,000 hens per hectare.
Dr Victoria Sandilands, head of the
SAC's Avian Science Research Centre said: “If AECL think that
20,000 hens/hectare is acceptable outdoors, then it would be too far
a stretch to say this is based on our work. This alteration would
need considerable research on what is acceptable outdoors to back it
up.
The research involved placing different
numbers of hens in pens inside a windowless room to check on patterns
of behaviour.
It
concluded that any space allowance of less than about 5000 cm2 per
hen imposed at least some
constraint
on free expression of behaviour.
Far
from suggesting that this meant that 2 birds per square metre was an
acceptable outdoor density – it meant that stocking density in
cages and sheds should be no more than 2 birds per square metre
instead of the currently allowed 14 - 15 birds per square metre.
If the Egg Corp interprets the Scottish research accurately, it will throw the industry into chaos.
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