Friday, 28 June, 2002

John Sheard, who has been condemning factory farming for 40 years, laments the latest row over battery hens.

AS a country fella at heart, I want to write about rushing streams, rising trout, warbling larks, fluffy clouds over verdant fells, busy bees at work in the hay meadow.

That's what I want to write about. But what do I get dumped on my plate this country week: another wadge of unsavoury, battery reared chicken. And my heart bleeds…

I was first taken around a battery hen farm on a former World War II airfield in Bedfordshire in, I think, 1960. Its owner had invested something like £100,000 to set it up - worth at least a million today - and he was extremely proud of himself.

I was absolutely appalled and have been appalled ever since that living creatures are allowed to exist in those conditions in a country which claims to be the world capital of animal compassion.

But, this week, there is more at stake than my own disgust. The NFU are at it again as if there has never been a crisis in the countryside - or should I say, a bucketful of crises these past 20 years - and they could not possibly have chosen a worse time.

I am quite convinced that nothing has done more to damage the general public's perception of food production than the oft repeated photographs and film of almost featherless, beakless birds in these animal Auschwitzes. These images bring disrepute on anyone involved in so-called "agriculture" (although, in fact, this is merely big business),

Various Governments have for years been trying to ban the system, or at least improve it, swimming against a tide of indifference in the EU and traditional cages are to be phased out here in 2012 (why ten years, I don't know).

After that, they will be replaced by bigger, allegedly more humane, "enriched" cages. Quite how you enrich a cage I also don't know and, it would appear, neither does the Government.

It is beginning to waver, thinks the NFU, and this week the union issued a strident demand that such a controversy should become subject to an "informed debate" (see News, Wednesday).

Yet this very same week, six other highly respected countryside organisations got together to appeal for more money for rural spending in next month's public spending round, to be announced by an iron chancellor famous for keeping a tight grip on his sporran (See News, Thursday).

With stock markets collapsing around the world, and millions of people's savings and pensions at risk, the urban public have probably lost interest in the countryside's problems, something no doubt picked up by the Government's myriad focus groups.

So to start a public row over the millions of pounds involved in a method of food production which is almost universally condemned is, to me, absolute folly, handing the Chancellor an ideal excuse to be stingy with other rural concerns.

Personally, I would like to see all mass production of eggs stopped. As farmers leave the countryside in their thousands, according to the doom merchants, we could see all those empty fields full of genuinely free range poultry doing as nature intended.

Then I would be able to write about plump hens and happy chicks, proud cocks and baskets of lovely, brown-shelled eggs with yolks the deepest orange…Sorry, getting carried away. But we can all dream, can't we?