Unfair competition for family farms

The action of Australian politicians in allowing poultry farms with stocking densities of 10,000 hens per hectare to describe their eggs as free range, opens up some major issues. One is the level of unfair competition from big business against small family farms.Another is that consumers won’t accept that definition. Most planning authorities are unlikely to accept such a density because of issues like odour, contamination of land, aquifers and waterways. It's likely that many planning authorities will refuse permits for new free range farms because of the absurdly high standards developed by politicians.

Biosecurity on free range farms

Following the Avian Flu outbreak at a major poultry farm in Young, NSW, we've had a number of enquiries about the issue of biosecurity on free range farms. All hens on that farm have now been culled, but there has been a second outbreak on a nearby farm.

Clearly all farms should address biosecurity issues in conjunction with their Quality Assurance and Food Safety programmes - but some don't. Until an enquiry has been completed into how this outbreak (or outbreaks) started, no-one knows why this happened.

Intensive farming always generates potential for rampant disease outbreaks but until the dust settles, no-one should be pointing fingers.

We have amended our Biosecurity and Poultry Disease Risk Management paper which is available on the download page of the Freeranger website and we will be including more biosecurity info in our workshops.

It's disappointing (but not surprising) that the new Federal Minister for Agriculture, Barnaby Joyce chose to buy into the issue saying that free range farming is to blame. An investigation into how the outbreaks started needs to be conducted before blame can be attributed.

Here's a Youtube video which is useful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vijE9bszf64&feature=player_embedded