What's the difference between organic and free range?
Organic will always mean that the animals have been able to free range, but organic also means a lot more. With free range products, there are no limits on the amount of birds that can be kept in a house. You can have tens of thousands of birds in a house,and as long as there are some pop-holes for the birds to go outside, they can technically be deemed as free range. The term "pecking order" comes from chickens, whereby some hens will go out the entrance to the pop-holes to the free range area, and won't allow other birds to go outside. Chickens originally were jungle fowl so they're used to being and living in the jungle. As such, they're quite timid birds, and unless there is tree cover and shelter for them outside in the 'free range' area, they don't really like the outside as their natural instinct tells them that a great, big vulture might come in and sweep them up. They need to be coaxed outside. Organic standards would mean we encourage birds outside by planting the range and making sure there's troughs out there, etc. Unlike organic, there's nothing to ensure that happens under free range standards. When birds are kept in huge numbers, as can happen with free range, they start displaying strange behaviour; they can start pecking at each other, feather-pecking. A way to get around that under free range standards is just clip their beak. Free range farmers trim their beaks so they're not able to do that and there are animal welfare implications of that. Free range, unlike organic, also means that when you're keeping birds in huge numbers together, they're quite stressed out and their immune systems are lower, so they're much more susceptible to diseases. As an insurance policy, the farmer would give the birds low doses of antibiotics to ensure that they don't get ill, and there are some real concerns about antibiotic resistance in human health. For example, we've got the MRSA bug and hospital bugs that we have no antibiotics for, and links are being made with the amount of antibiotics that are being consumed by farm animals as we are consuming the produce of these farm animals. Under organic standards, routine antibiotics are not allowed. There is also a lot of GM feed coming into this country. Although no GM crops are being grown commercially at the moment, the GM is coming in through the back door in animal feed, allowed under free range regulations. Organic standards, however, ban the use of GM feed.
