Monthly Archives - November 2016

Free Range Egg Labelling – Have your say

On 31 March 2016, Consumer Affairs Ministers agreed to the introduction of an information standard requiring eggs labelled as ‘free range’ to have been laid by hens that had meaningful and regular access to an outdoor range, and were subject to an outdoor stocking density of 10,000 hens per hectare or less. The information standard will require producers to prominently disclose the outdoor stocking density of hens laying free range eggs on their packaging allowing consumers to easily compare different [...]

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Plucky ideas for feathers

The extraction of keratin protein from chicken feathers poses an environmentally friendly and cost-effective way to rid the poultry industry of waste. Glenneis Kriel reports. Poultry consumption generates more than five million tons of feathers a year. Demand for this by-product is unfortunately low, with most of it ending up being burned, buried or ground up as feed for livestock. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, along with the University of KwaZulu-Natal, is however researching [...]

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Hens and Trees

When designing any kind of system or service it is important to see it from the user’s point of view. We believe the same is true for animal agriculture. When McDonald’s UK tasked us with improving their egg supply chain we started our process by understanding the chicken. McDonald’s Hens and Trees We discovered that our ordinary chicken’s ancestor was a South East Asian jungle fowl. It lived and flourished under the canopy of trees. This varied environment allowed the chicken [...]

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Hatchability

It is well known that storing eggs longer than 7 days decreases the hatchability. In fact, the longer eggs are stored, the higher the losses in hatchability (Figure 1). Stored eggs have a higher rate of 
embryonic mortality between days 2 and 3 of incubation, and need more time to complete incubation…Read more

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