Scratching around
There’s nothing like the mass disappearance of eggs to get people’s attention.
When I call James from Mountain View Free Range he’s just coming home from their farmers market stand in Flemington.
It’s so flat out, he says wearily, we just can’t keep up with demand. Customers are only getting a dozen each.
Likewise, since June when eight poultry farms near Meredith tested positive for a highly pathogenic H7 avian influenza, Mountain View’s egg supply to Fair Food has dropped by a third.
The bird flu which spread across the border from commercial poultry farms in NSW and ACT was controlled by stage agriculture agencies who culled almost two million hens.
Only a few months later another H7 outbreak in four more commercial egg farms near Euroa resulted in another six hundred thousand hens being culled.
This loss of more than 10% of Australia’s laying flock has been traumatic to everyone involved.
James explains, There’s no insurance for bird flu, if it happens you lose your flock, you lose everything. For us it would be the end.
The impact of the outbreaks isn’t just being felt on the quarantined farms, small free range egg farmers are also feeling the effects.
James explains to keep eggs coming they regularly replenish their flock selling their older chooks to backyard gardeners. They were expecting replacement pullets from their breeder two months ago but they haven’t arrived.
James can’t help feeling that small farms like Mountain View are being pushed to the back of the queue while the large commercial operations buy up all the available layers.
For the time being they just make do and work hard to keep avian flu off their farm.
Mountain View workers aren’t allowed to keep backyard chooks at home and have to sterilise their boots in footbaths before they come onto the farm.
Truck drivers dropping off at Mountain View wear disposable hygiene suits and shoes over boots, their trucks are deep-cleaned before they come and then before they go to the next farm.
At CERES on Wednesday, farmer Tammi Jonas, who’s also President of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, dropped in to do an interview with Channel Seven News. She wanted to know why we put all this effort into containment but talk so little about bird flu’s causes?
Tammi says we don’t talk because we know bird flu is coming from our overcrowded industrial poultry operations and that stopping it means radically changing the way we farm.
James believes change starts with more transparency. A farm can have 30,000 hens in a huge shed on a bare three hectare block and label their eggs free range as long they leave a door open.
Meanwhile, our hens are out in the paddock before the sun’s up scratching around in miles of space and are labelled the same.
Down at the Fair Food warehouse we’re putting new eggs out each day so everyone has a chance to get some, and BTW thanks for sticking with the one dozen per order limit.
Have a great week
Chris
