Egg Exemptions and the Battery Barons
The Soil and Health Association of New Zealand commends The New Zealand Food Safety Authority for cutting back on
compliance for small scale egg producers. Soil and Health had previously urged Free Range egg lovers and producers to
resist Wellington bureaucracy’s attempt to force onerous and unnecessary compliance costs on them
The late Thursday announcement of an exemption for egg producers with 100 hens or less from the requirement for Risk
Management Plans, should help retain small, local, ‘happy egg’ producers, according to Soil & Health’s Co-chair and spokesperson Steffan Browning. Many free range hens have already been culled and others were set
to follow. Many of the now exempt flocks will be Free Range birds.
The next step for encouragement of humanely produced and healthy eggs will be for the Government Regulations Review
Select Committee to give the Free Range egg producers their fair share of the egg commodity levy. Currently all egg
commodity levies go to the Egg Producers Federation, that is dominated by battery hen interests that appear to actively
work against the promotion of Free Range production.
That is blatantly unjust according to Soil and Health who support The Free Range Egg Association’s (FREA) call that
FREA would better use its own contributions to advance healthy, humane egg production for Kiwi consumers.
Soil & Health’s Steffan Browning, contends that free range egg production is essentially pastoral farming, while battery eggs
are inhumanely factory produced. The big battery egg producers that dominate the Egg Producers Federation using levy
money collected from both free range and battery producers, have eagerly lobbied for and accepted the RMP system, with
the knowledge that it will give battery production more market share and help them maintain their heartless production
methods.
Large scale health risks are far more likely from the intensive and cruel factories, than the pastoral farming free
range happy hens.
Soil and Healths suggests an approach of guidelines on risk management and good labeling systems for tracking egg
sources which would ease the compliance hurdles for larger Free Range producers and still cover the risk management
needs of NZFSA according to Steffan Browning