water pollution is a major result of intensive egg production. Australia's 'free range' standards need to be changed

Intensive egg farms are causing water pollution all over the world. Here’s part of a report in the UK’s Times newspaper. The Wye Valley is a centre for the poultry industry. Modern, multitiered units with as many as 64,000 hens on one farm are dotted near the banks of the river and its tributaries in Powys and Herefordshire. These farms produce tens of millions of free-range eggs a year — including Britain’s most popular brand, the Happy Egg Company — and thousands of tons of manure. Pollutants that wash off farmland are blamed for contaminating the Wye with phosphates, fuelling blooms of thick algae that can suffocate a river.Australia's politicians are allowing pollution on an industrial scale following their approval of a ridiculous standard of 10,000 hems per hectare to be classified as free range production when the previous maximum was 1500. An average chicken produces half a cubic metre of manure per year, meaninhg that at 10,000 hens per hectare, every year a pile of 5000 cubic metres of manure is deposited on each hectare of land.