From: wheeler@super.org (Ferrell S. Wheeler)
Subject: UPC Free Range Tours
Organization: Supercomputing Research Center (Bowie, MD)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 16:15:43 GMT


HOME ON THE RANGE

UPC recently visited two small-scale egg farms in Pennsylvania:
Walnut Acres Organic Farms and Sauder's Penn Dutch Eggs.

Walnut Acres.

Their catalog says their poultry comes from chickens "fed organic
grains.  Never caged, they're allowed to run on open ground, as
weather permits."  On arriving at the farm, we were told Walnut
Acres no longer raises their own broiler chickens because of "too
many predators."  They buy from Welsh Family Organic Farms in
Lansing, Iowa.  Walnut Acres keeps 275 hens at a time to produce
eggs for their mayonnaise, so we visited these hens.  The hens are
a "sex-link" mixture of Brown Leghorn and Rhode Island Red.  About
a dozen roosters are also kept to "calm" the hens.  The hens are
debeaked.  They lay eggs for 2 years before being sent to slaughter
for soup and miscellaneous items.  They're fed corn, oats,
soybeans, limestone, and oyster shells.  They have raised nest
boxes in the middle of the shed to lay their eggs and a littered
floor composed of rye or wheat straw.

Each hen has about 2 square feet of floor space in keeping with the
USDA Farmer's Bulletin #2262 recommendation of 2 square feet per
individual small layer and 3 square feet for each bird of heavier
breeds in "free range" housing.  The hens live in an enclosed shed
with a pophole leading to an outside dirt yard with scant
vegetation in one corner.  Two or three hens went out briefly while
we were there.  The shed is "open house," meaning there are windows
allowing air in from the outside.  The manager said chickens get
bored easily which can cause them to pick at each other.  A way to
fix this, he said, is to "throw in a slab of alfalfa hay or small
hunks of grass with the sod to keep them occupied."  He said the
protein in small feathers can also cause confined chickens to pick
at each other.

The birds are trucked 100 miles away to be slaughtered.  The
manager grabs them by their legs when they're sleeping at night and
stuffs them into the wooden crates that he showed us, about 16
chickens per crate.

Sauder's, Inc.
Lititz, PA.

Sauder's ia a battery hen operation apart from this small venture.
Their brown "Nest-Fresh Eggs from free-roaming hens" are currently
sold in some Washington, DC area Giant Stores.  They're priced at
$2.89 a dozen compared to $1.03 a dozen for battery eggs.

The Sauder's tour guide took us to an Amish contract farm where
4,200 hens occupy an enclosed "open house" shed with 9,600 square
feet of floor space giving each hen 2 square feet of floor space to
roam around in.  The hens never go outside.  There is 1 rooster per
100 hens, about 40 roosters in all.  The hens are the "sex-link"
mixture of Brown Leghorn and Rhode Island Red.  They are debeaked.
We asked why the hens were given so little individual floor space,
and were told " A hen won't lay as many eggs if she gets exercise.
Also, active hens need more feed making the eggs cost more to
produce.  Caged hens get lower-power feed, so their eggs cost
less."

The backs of many hens were almost featherless.  When we asked why,
we were told, "They're ready to go out," -- be sent to slaughter
(?).  The hens were said to be killed after a year of producing 1
egg every 2 or 3 days.  Metal nest boxes line the walls and a
slatted platform runs the length of the shed for birds to perch and
roost on.  The farmer indicated he thought the birds would be
better off outside running around, where "they are not a likely to
peck each other" and because "chickens love earth worms which they
know are good for them."

The tour guide acted as if he didn't know what we meant when we
asked how the birds managed to preen themselves with such blunted
beaks.  He said keeping uncaged hens could never be "economical on
a large scale" and that this floor litter system is "a bigger
potential source of disease than the cage because the birds are
picking about in accumulating feces."  He said the litter is
completely changed every 2 or 3 years.  The eggs are weighed on the
spot.  The farmer explained that "small, medium, and large" refer
to the weight, not size, of an egg.