just as a matter of interest

If the supermarkets are paying the farmer less than it costs to produce the goods, there will be no goods. Simples.

It's not going to happen is it. The supermarkets have to have produce, are they going to take people off the checkouts to grow it?

Any female is born with a finite number of eggs already in her body. Chickens are bred to use up almost all those eggs within the first 80 to 90 weeks of their life.

I think Cyril Bason's POL are only around £5 or £6 each , so at £4 I think your farmer will be laughing all the way to the bank

£8 to £9 actually, but they have come down in price, when we were going to buy from Bason's a few years back, Im sure they were £12 plus.

But yes I agree, if the farmer gets £4 for them, he will have made a profit from them as well as all the eggs they've laid.

And I'm sorry Vecten, although you are right in that we need to educate the people we know, most of this is dictated by the supermarkets.  They DO tell us what we want, its part of their marketing strategy.  That's why certain things are always near the checkouts, to get you to impulse buy them.  That's why they move things around every so often, so that to find what you want, you have to keep wandering around looking for it, and buying all the others 'bargains' you see in passing.

I don't want to turn this into a political debate or Auntie will lock the thread, but I know a farmer, when we lived in Essex who was making 3p profit on each meat chicken he sold.  I think another was mentioned on the forum a few years back, and Brian's friend Don who used to have a turkey farm, was approached by a buyer from Safeway back in the late 90's.  We will buy all your turkeys he told Don.  Oh yes, Don said and how much will you pay me for the?  £8 each he was told.  At the time it was costing us, more than £8 to rear them, so although a bit cheaper for Don, he still wouldn't have made much on each turkey.  So he told the buyer where to go and carried on selling them from his own little shop for £25 !

And if the farmers demand more money for their produce, the supermarkets will just buy more in from abroad.  sorry, rant over

I would say that although people are becoming more aware now, many people are still ignorant of where thier food actually comes from.

Wheni have to buy eggs (and thatnkfully it is not often now), I purposely buy free range organic eggs - I wont even buy barn eggs knowning the density in which hens can be kept in barns according to the EU directives.  But they are almost 4x the price of caged hen eggs.

I guess a lot of people look at the eggs and think "well I can buy 30 eggs for 2.50€, or I could buy 6 for 3.80€... hmm"

Also, people have to remember that even if they buy free range eggs, the majority of eggs in ready made food stuffs are from caged hens, and until the manufactureres change thier suppliers there isn't much we can do to avoid it.

You are right in saying that supermarkets will source from the cheapest available and most sustainable producer but I can't accept that it is not demand led. People want cheap produce.

It is human nature to buy the cheapest and supermarket prices are led by competition. I also believe that they tell us what we want - if we can't see what we want we have to buy what they have.

Milk and pork being sold for less than it costs to produce is not a recent thing. Thousands of dairy farmers have gone out of business or just sold up. We now import milk from France!!!!!
Many farmers stay with what they do because they could not live a different life.

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.