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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall at his new river cottage shop in Axminster where he is taking on the big supermarkets with his organic meat and produce

THE chicken and the egg have been at the centre of a media circus recently with Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall vying for position as ringmaster.

What has perhaps received less attention is the Government's confirmation that Britain will press ahead with outlawing the production of battery-farmed eggs by 2012, despite pressure to postpone the proposed EU ban.

Both Hugh's Chicken Run and Jamie's Fowl Dinners had their disturbing moments. The sight of newly-born male chicks being gassed in front of a live audience at Jamie's gala dinner was perhaps one of the most chilling things I have seen on television.

But we are mollycoddled, most of us, from the processes which bring food to our plates.

The very night the programme was aired, battery eggs were found in Jamie's restaurant Fifteen Cornwall, which shows how two-sided the whole business is.

We are concerned about the chickens' welfare, but we like our eggs cheap and plentiful.

In the UK we eat a lot of eggs - more than 10 billion a year - 86 per cent of which are laid by battery-caged hens. As well as being sold whole, eggs form a vital ingredient of a number of foods including mayonnaise, biscuits and even wine. Interestingly, on January 15 - four days after Jamie's programme was aired - Hellmann's announced its decision to go free-range.

A spokesperson said: "From February 2008, eggs used will be from free-range birds and by June 2008 all Hellmann's Mayonnaise on the supermarket shelves will have been made using free-range eggs."

Happy hens on a free-range farm

But what do the people whose farms produce eggs make of it all? This week I interviewed free-range egg producer Anne Barnes, half of the husband-wife team that owns and runs Wyke Oliver Farm in Preston, Weymouth. Anne and her husband Brian keep their birds on three acres of land, fenced off into different sections for hens of different ages.

"It's absolutely wonderful," said Anne of the Government sticking to the 2012 deadline. "When we gave up our dairy cows and decided to go over to chicken, we looked at some battery farms. It was like walking down a train tunnel. The noise was horrendous, but there was no smell because it's air-conditioned.

"So we decided we would not go down that road because of what we saw. We have 12ft by 20ft houses, which hold from 75 to 200 birds in each."

The chickens are shut in the houses at night and, under normal conditions when we are bird flu free, peck around outside in their pens during the day.

"We have got about 500 chickens," said Anne. "We do go up to 600 or 700 in the summer as there is a bigger demand then. We supply a couple of local shops as well - Joy's at Overcombe and the Spar shop in Preston - and a number of guesthouses and shops in Dorchester."

The most obvious problem with battery farms is that the birds do not have the freedom to express natural behaviour such as dust bathing, foraging and roosting.

Anne said: "When we first started doing chickens, I bought a dozen or so battery hens and when we put them with the bantams, they were hiding in the nest boxes; they didn't know what to do. We put a lot of corn outside and put them outside and they were soon scratching around."

The farm produces around 300 eggs a day. Anne bakes cakes with the spare eggs, while Brian looks after the chickens, grades and stamps the eggs. "It's time-consuming," she said. "We have to collect the eggs twice a day. We have rollaway nest boxes so the next chicken does not make the egg dirty."

The problem with free-range, Anne admits, is that production is less efficient. She said: "The way we do free range, I do not think they produce so much food for the food they eat."

How do the prices measure up? "When we sell eggs at the door, we charge 60p for half a dozen small eggs and £1.10 for extra large," said Anne. "To the shops we sell cheaper and they put their own prices on them. At supermarkets, they are £1.30 to £1.40 per half-dozen."

Yet these are the prices of free-range eggs, which are, of course, undercut by intensively-produced eggs.

Anne blames 'pressure from the public' for the industry being the way it is and the fact we are all thinking about our pockets. This is made evident by the way dirt-cheap eggs are bought in from abroad.

"People bring us egg boxes to refill and some of the labels on the boxes say, from the provinces of France,'" she said. "When we did the National Farmers' Union supermarket watch, I was pricing what was English," she added. "We had a couple of families that were going for the cheapest ones; they were the French ones."

Consumer concern for the welfare of chickens and consumer penny-pinching are at odds. What happens in the industry remains to be seen. But since this Government is determined to press on with the 2012 deadline for battery-farmed eggs, next week I ask the farmers working in intensive egg production what they make of the changes on the horizon.

8:26am Monday 18th February 2008

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