Could avian flu spell end free range eggs?
Peter Barton is as uneasy as the rest of them. The organic poultry farmer has 50,000 hens scuttling around his fields in East Sussex. He, like many farmers, thought if anyone was going to be hit by bird flu, it would be someone like him. “We are obviously very concerned about what has happened, but it’s not a total surprise,” he says. “We’ve been expecting this for the last two or three years. However, I am very surprised how it turned up on an intensive farm rather than on one of ours. They are able to have much higher biosecurity. Our birds just run around and come into close contact with all things wild and natural. It flies in the face of logic. Something has gone wrong somewhere.
