Claims from egg experts

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34128, 14 April 1976, Page 22

Claims from egg experts

( Btr

TERRY McGOVERNE)

Do live garden worms, the left-overs of the breakfast porridge, bits of silver beet, cold burnt toast and boiled potato peelings produce better eggs than scientifically produced poultry mash?

The answer to that settles the question why housewives will buy so called free range eggs in preference to battery produced eggs.

Hundreds of Christchurch housewives prefer to nip out into the country’ to buy from farmers who have a few eggs left over from their free

wandering and pecking chooks. Such people are adamant that the eggs are better, much better, than those produced by battery birds. According to the general manager of Combined Co-operative Distributors Ltd (Mr F. Piper) free range eggs are as scarce as hens’ teeth. Commenting yesterday on reports about so-called black marketing of eggs between producers and retailers, Mr Piper said 99 per cent of the eggs produced in Canterbury came from birds housed in cages. He did not know of anyone running their fowls in open country. Mr Piper agreed that there

was considerable trafficking between retailers and battery producers which was illegal. There was no objection to people going to the producer to buy eggs for their own consumption, but they could not resell them. Mr Piper does not agree that eggs from hens allowed to peck about outside are any better than those produced by battery housed hens. The battery hens, he says, are fed according to scientific formulae designed to produce top quality eggs. Regulations controlling the sale of eggs are designed for the orderly marketing of a commodity which is in surplus throughout the world.