Regarding future egg production.
Human females are born with some fifty thousand eggs, per ovary, of which they have two.
13 eggs are expended a year, human women dont live for 7500 years.
Comercial hens are bred to produce lots of eggs quickly, but they should still be laying two a week when they're five.
Most "backyard" hens will be have been bred for speedy over lengthy production originaly anyway.
I think the BHWT is great, but farmers selling on their "spent" chickens is (or should be) the endgame for them, at which point they can cheer they arent needed anymore and disolve.
UK Farmers are in dire straites, but its wrong and extremely unhelpful to just shout "down with Tesco".
Yes, supermarkets are hard customers to deal with, do you think they are just ********* with British Farmers but throw bags of money at Kiwis?
The UK and EU has an extremely uncompetive environment for farming, its actualy illegal to plough land, except within EU dictated Plouighing seasons.
Thats before we consider CAP and the ineffective but time consuming disease control red tape.
Finaly, we have the farmers themselves.
A small sheep farm in New Zealand might be 1000 acres.
Here a small sheep farm is 100 acres.
A big sheep farm in New Zealand might be 60,000 Acres.
There is currently, or was recently, a farming estate for sale in wales.
The Brecon Estate. It totaled 1500 acres. Divided into eight farms.
Anywhere else in the world, that would have been made into a single farm decades ago.
You can have a small one man band farm if youre making a speciality product, not if your making standard quality pork.
Think Super Car compared to Hatchback....
What the UK farming sector desperatly needs is to fail.
The people who really want to make a go of it need to then buy the land from the 10 farms that surround them and sell the farmhouses to stockbrokers.