Oct 07 2008
French Free Range Chicken Farming
This year has seen a lot of high profile publicity about the plight of broiler & battery chickens in the UK. I’ve been buying free range chicken & eggs for a few years now, and don’t know a huge amount about the industry other than what I’ve read in the papers. I wanted to find out more about the free range chicken industry in France - and a whole lot more I did find, particularly on free range egg production on the Farming UK website.
One of the first things that came out of the Chicken Out campaign led by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was that the demand for free range chicken in the UK rose considerably - supermarkets couldn’t meet the supply, and Sainsbury’s imported free range chicken from France to keep up with the demand.
The most well known label in France for free range chicken is ‘Label Rouge‘ which you can buy in some British supermarkets. I’m not sure that there’s a British equivalent, perhaps Freedom Food, although Label Rouge has higher standards than the EU stipulates. In terms of egg production according to Farming UK:
“Label Rouge requires a lower external stocking density for hens. For standard Free Range production, producers in France must observe an external stocking density of 4 square metres minimum per hen (i.e. 2,500 hens per hectare) and an internal stocking density of 9 hens per square metre, with 4 levels permitted in multi-tier systems. For Label Rouge producers, the internal stocking level is the same, but the external requirement is 5 square metres minimum per hen. In addition, Label Rouge producers are limited to a maximum of 6,000 birds per house, and a maximum of two houses. For ordinary Free Range, there is no upper limit on the number of birds that a producer can keep.”
also:
“out of all the European countries, the UK has the highest proportion of non-organic Free Range (egg) production and France has the second highest proportion, but the gap is wide: 27% and 12% of national production respectively. Perhaps surprisingly in view of the above, Organic Free Range accounts for the same percentage of total national egg production in both countries, at around 3%.”
I was quite surprised the British figure was higher than the French figure as I believed that free range chicken/egg production was higher in France than in the UK.
I also found out more about the Rolls Royce of French chickens during my research, the ‘Poulet de Bresse‘ (official site in French). These chickens are raised in the Bourg-en-Bresse area and are some of the most expensive chicken you can buy. They are the only chicken that has the AOC certification (Appellation d’Origine Controlée) and you can pay about £3-4 per kilo more than a standard free range chicken. You can read more about these chickens on The Guardian website.
From reading about the free range egg and chicken industry it seems there’s still quite a long way to go to increase the percentages of chickens raised this way, not only in the UK, but things are at least moving in the right direction as consumers become more aware of how these animals are raised.
I’ve been trying to find out more about broiler chickens in France too, rather than just egg-laying chickens, but haven’t found many stats on this yet. Any information would be welcome!
