THEn the whole of the European Union there are 366 million hens. Considering that 447 million live there, and that the hens surveyed by Ismea are only laying hens, it can be said with good approximation that for each of us there are at least two hens each. A great responsibility. Over the years, the demand for better treatment for these poultry animals has become more and more pressing. Away with the cages, away with the culling of male chicks (Animal Equality reminds us that there is a law under consideration in the Senate to ban it from 2027), away the over-exploitation that causes suffering and broken bones.
(Getty)
Battered chickens
Yet, in Italy, hens in cages – the space foresees only 750 square cm per biped – they are still 42 percent, while only four per cent scratch outdoors, and five per cent go to organic farms. That’s why, the old dilemma “Was the chicken or the egg born first?” sounds outdated now. That it is no longer about who comes first, but how we are and how we live in this world.Which, as we should have learned by now, has a lot to do with our health and that of the planet, with the protection of biodiversity, and a sustainable quality of life for all.
Purebred keepers
On the other hand, the hen has been carrying around for five years now a curious phenomenon of custom. Starting with Isabella Rossellini and Gisele Bündchen who cleared them through customsor maybe it would be better to say shooting, like pets, up to Sofia Goggia, that a few months ago, in an interview with Corriere della Sera, he told of “his” 2500 hens who live free in a wood of the Seriana valley (Le Selvagge), listening to classical music and fed with special snacks, and in which it has invested for the sake of territory and ancient peasant culture.
(Getty)
The hens of Romagna
For its part, in the Emilian Val Termina, Valentina Cipelli of Il Podere Cristina defines herself as a “guardian farmer”. “Protecting biodiversity has been our goal ever since we moved here to change our lives and produce ourselves the raw material for our sustenance such as vegetables, cereals or meat. Then we joined the recovery project of the “Romagnola hen”, a breed abandoned due to slow growth times, the low productivity (at most they lay three eggs a week), and the lack of taming.
Wild animals
They are almost wild animals, they sleep in trees even at a height of twenty meters, but they have a beautiful and colorful livery, blue legs. I am enthusiastic about it, so much so that for fifteen now I have been a few hundred. It is our contribution to improve the precarious balance of the ecosystem “. «Making culture around the poultry world is another way to talk about respect for the territory, which is why we have set up the Chicken Academy» replies Laura Peri from Montevarchi.
(Getty)
At thirty, after a degree in Banking Economics, has donated a “Valdarnese Bianca” chicken farm, the same ones that his grandfather had: rebels to the cloister, with cannibalism problems if locked up in tight spaces, and with a very low yield, since it takes over six months, instead of the classic forty-five days, in any case to have a slender specimen with a small chest and long thigh.
First of all, the welfare of the hens
«The welfare of the animal comes first. Who visits my company he sees them living in an eight-hectare wood among oaks, junipers, strawberry trees, and sheltering in chestnut wood huts like a hundred years ago. I don’t use antibiotics, we maintain healthiness by adopting rotating sanitary vacuums, and we only slaughter one chicken at a time. Soon we will also have transparent glass chickens for the educational farm, while with the “Valdarno Nero” we are trying to activate a circular economy recycling their beautiful green-veined plumage for fashion accessories ».
(Getty)
Eggs of all colors
And who knows if by doing so, the most ridiculed animal on the planet, you go back to being that great bird revered by men who they considered it a good luck charm, and from the origins, despite its spread, still mysterious.
“One day I saw colored eggs and I wondered where they came from. So I started traveling all over Italy to meet those strange producers from various amateurs.
In Umbria for the “Cream Legbar” which has English origins, in Trentino for the“Araucana” which comes from the Chilean Andes, and then the French “Marans”, the Americans “Plymouth Rock” And “New Hampshire”and of course the Italians “Livornese” And “Millefiori” of Lonigo ».
Garda egg
This is how Federica Bin recounts her prophetic encounter with the mysterious poultry world. Meeting from which the project was born and Garda Eggorganic and cosmopolitan farm with hens che produces blue, blue, olive green, white, brown eggs …
“At the beginning I had a dozen, just for my fresh pasta, then I met a veterinarian in Lessinia, and I understood how to start a production.
Now I have a thousand of them in ten thousand meters of land here in Lazise, among wooden huts, perches and fruit trees, while I entrust chicken coops with up to two hundred hens to various farmers.
(getty)
“My girls”
But they are always “my girls”: in the summer I sit on the lawn and they come to pick my nail polish! ». That they are like that, the hens, intelligent, nice, and very curious, and they can live, few know it, even beyond ten years. A park for laying hens «If we stopped seeing them only as egg churners, perhaps we would treat them better» says Maria Greco.
His, in the countryside of Cutrofiano, it is the largest open-air chicken park in Europe. It is called The Perfect Egg because the layers arrive here in the waning phase of their productivity and therefore destined for slaughter.
“When we welcome them they are plucked, frightened, undernourished, they take a couple of weeks to adjust to new food and environment, but most make it. Now they live in six thousand in twenty five thousand square meters, they lay eggs according to their natural availability and die of old age. I call it zero violence breeding ».
Adopt a hen
It must be said that the “perfect egg”, on which Greekdegree in sociology and social research, made an initial investment of 20 thousand euros, costs from 70 cents to one euro and 50. To reduce the cost, one solution is to adopt a hen. This is the idea that Federica Agostinelli of Pollo Allegro had. “It all started with an Instagram awareness page during the lockdown, then, living in a country house in the Marche region, I said to myself “Why not really do it?”.
I started hosting roosters, including Peter, the undisputed king of the chicken coop with his five kilos and seven years, and hens at the end of their career. Maria, Lenina, Nadia, Ernesta, Miranda, Nilde… They all have a name. Those who adopt them receive a certificate of adoption and updates on their state of healthand above all he receives the eggs that the hen lays, and when he passes by to collect them, he can also spend time with his biped! ».
Ezra Bailey (Getty)
Anti-cholesterol feed
In short, another breeding is possible, starting with feed. Being outdoors guarantees certain nutritional components such as calcium, and unstressed hens produce lighter eggs and richer in good fats. Silvia Bambagini Oliva has taken a step further.
«The intuition came to me because of the cholesterol problems of my mother, a fan of chickens, and who was advised to take linseed oil and hemp. I started an experiment with the Zooprophylactic Institute of Teramo and after four years we had the “formula”: add twelve percent flaxseed and hemp to the feed to have healthy hens che produces eggs with higher amounts of Omega 3 and 6“.
The perfect egg
But the two thousand and five hundred “Livornesi” who scratch at the foot of Mount Velino, among hundreds of fruit trees, rosemary and lavender in profusion, red fruit plants and goji berries which they feed freely, they also enjoy a special mash made from Solina wheat bran, typical of the Abruzzo mountains, mixed with chopped garlic, vinegar of apples, ginger, turmeric, cinnamon and chilli, to protect the immune system and avoid antibiotics.
The secret ingredient in the farm-made soy, bran and corn feed they eat the hens of “Romina Accosato” are instead the drops of Piedmontese milk at zero km: “It happened almost by chance, we didn’t understand why some chickens didn’t eat and they drank and we tried to bite them with some milk. It worked, ”he says. The Piemunteisa egg is the flagship of the company and of these spoiled hens, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that they look good. Because now we can say that before the egg, the hen comes.
iO Donna © REPRODUCTION RESERVED