Farming Today This Week

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Farming Today: Farming Today This Week

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Brown or white eggs, lambing time, farm bird survey.

Caz Graham looks into the welfare claims around white-shelled eggs.

The Free Range Egg Producers Association say hens that lay brown eggs are more aggressive than hens that lay white eggs. Birds have their beaks trimmed to prevent them from hurting each other, but beak trimming is considered by many animal welfare groups to be a cruel practice. The government would like to phase it out, but some farmers are concerned that would mean more serious 'hen-pecking' and are calling on consumers to change to white eggs to help improve welfare. We investigate the claims.

It's lambing season and adverts for lambing assistants are popping up all over social media, because finding labour to help in the lambing sheds isn't easy. We visit a sheep farmer busy lambing his two thousand ewes near Stratford on Avon. He enlists around 20 vet students to help each year, as well as additional paid staff, but finding them is getting increasingly difficult and it could mean downsizing his flock.

And we go out at night, surveying birds on a farm in south Staffordshire. Members of the Belvide Bird Ringing Group are using thermal imaging cameras to catch and ring species like skylarks which are hard to get hold of using more traditional methods like mist nets. Usually only about 200 skylarks a year are ringed across the whole of the UK but with this high tech kit, the team ringed 400 on just one farm.

Presented by Caz Graham
Produced by Heather Simons

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