The Range Birds Actually Use

#Fourteen percent

In the only controlled trial of broilers run behind cattle, researchers watched the birds and counted where they were. Only 14.0% of the broilers were observed out on the pasture at any given time, with the range across observation periods running from 6% to 28%. Ranging decreased as solar radiation increased (χ² = 8.9, p < 0.01). And the birds spent 41.4% of their time sitting, with a range of 31% to 52% (Phillips, Moon, Sorge & Heins 2020, Animals 10(12):2429).

Read that against the last lesson. You have just gone through the trouble of securing a lawful route to market and discovered that "Free Range" is the only production claim you are permitted to print. Now the research says that on a sunny day roughly six birds in seven are not on the range at all.

Three things about that study matter for how you use it here. It was run at the West Central Research and Outreach Center in Morris, Minnesota — an organic dairy, with broilers following cows, which makes it more relevant to the eggmobile-behind-cattle model, not less. It has never been replicated in South Africa. And the finding that transfers most cleanly is the solar-radiation one, because the Highveld carries substantially higher solar radiation and a mid-summer UV index that regularly exceeds 11. The direction of the effect is well established; the magnitude under a Meyerton December is an inference, not a measurement, and should be expected to be worse than Minnesota's rather than better.

#The twenty-times slide

Put two numbers side by side and the word "free range" stops meaning what a consumer assumes it means.

Standard	Outdoor allowance	Per hectare
South Africa — GN R345 reg 8(2)(a)(ii)	≤5 adult hens/m²	50 000 hens/ha
European Union — Reg (EC) 589/2008, Annex II §1(c)	1 hen per 4 m²	2 500 hens/ha
SAPA Code of Practice 2022 (voluntary)	0.5 m²/bird	20 000 birds/ha

South Africa's legal free-range outdoor stocking allowance is twenty times denser than the EU's. Both instruments have been read directly; this is not an estimate. And the voluntary SAPA Code, which retailers audit against, sits between them at 20 000 birds per hectare — stricter than the law, still eight times the EU figure.

The legal position

The free-range rules that are actually law, from GN R345 of 20 March 2020 under the Agricultural Product Standards Act 119 of 1990:

Indoors: 10 or fewer adult hens per square metre (reg 8(2)(a)(i)). The regulation carries no perch concession.
Outdoors: 5 or fewer adult hens per square metre (reg 8(2)(a)(ii)) — 50 000 hens per hectare.
At least 50% living vegetation present on the range at all times (reg 8(2)(a)(ii)(aa)(bbb)). This is a legal condition of the label, not a nicety.
Shade by way of trees or artificial structures at 4 square metres per 1 000 adult hens (reg 8(2)(a)(ii)(aa)(ccc)).

Do not confuse the law with the code. The often-quoted allowance of 12 hens/m² indoors where perches of at least 15 cm per hen are provided comes from the voluntary SAPA Code of Practice 2022, not from R345. Conversely the 50% living-vegetation rule is law, and is often taught as merely good practice. Teaching a voluntary figure as law, or law as voluntary, is the failure mode here.

Note reg 17: these production-method requirements are interim, applying only until regulations for management control systems are promulgated.

Now do the shade arithmetic, because it is the number that gives the game away. Four square metres per 1 000 adult hens is 40 square centimetres per bird. That is less than the footprint of a standing hen. A regulation that requires you to provide less shade than a bird physically occupies is not a design standard; it is a box to tick.

The 50% living-vegetation rule is the more useful legal number, and for an unexpected reason: it converts a label condition into a monitored variable. If more than half the ground inside your netting is bare, you have not merely damaged your pasture — you have lost the only production claim R345 allows you to print. That turns move interval from a preference into a compliance obligation.

#The design test that replaces the legal figure

There is no South African trial establishing an optimal shade area per bird on range. None could be found. So rather than fabricate a figure, use a test you can stand in front of and check.

Do this on the farm

The December shade test. Between roughly 13h00 and 15h00 on a hot, clear December day, walk your range and ask one question: if every bird in this flock decided to be in shade at the same moment, could they be?

If the answer is no, the shade is decorative and the range is not a range — it is a fenced area birds cross at dawn and dusk.

To size it, borrow R345's own indoor figure rather than inventing one. The regulation accepts 10 adult hens per square metre as a workable standing density indoors, so allow 0.1 m² of shade per hen as a design starting point:

500 hens → about 50 m² of shade, against a legal requirement of 2 m².
200 hens → about 20 m² of shade, against a legal requirement of 0.8 m².

That is roughly 25 times the legal figure, and it is a derivation from the regulation's own density allowance, not a published standard. Treat it as a starting point to test on your own place, and adjust it upward if you find birds queuing or panting at the edge of the shade.

Then apply three siting rules:

No bird more than about 20 m from shade. A bird that has to cross 60 m of open, hot ground will not.
Build shade and raptor cover as one structure. The SAPA Code requires that "in locations where overhead predators frequently occur, provision must be made for outside cover to reduce stress reactions from such sightings". A bird that can see a raptor and has nowhere to hide is a stressed bird that stops ranging. Shade and cover solve the same behavioural problem, so build the infrastructure once.
On the Highveld, shade in December and windbreak in July are the same structure. Site it accordingly, and hail-rate anything you put over birds.

R345 accepts shade "by way of trees or artificial structures", so portable shade cloth on light frames, the sheltered side of a windbreak, and a young orchard or agroforestry row are all lawful ways to deliver it. Trees are the slowest of them, which is a reason to plant in year one rather than year five.

Two consequences follow from getting shade right that farmers usually attribute to something else. Feed intake changes by roughly 1.5% per °C away from the 20 °C norm, and water consumption is roughly double feed intake by mass and rises steeply with temperature (SAPA Layer Book). The SAPA Code sets a target of 15–33 °C with relative humidity at or below 80% for fully feathered birds. Heat on the range shows up on your feed bill and in your egg weights before it shows up as a dead bird.

South African specifics

Theft is a design constraint here, and the industry says so in writing. The SAPA Code of Practice 2022 concedes: "It is recognized that the prevalence of livestock theft is a reality, which restricts the provision of more extensive ranges."

That is an unusual admission for a welfare code, and it has a practical consequence on a peri-urban Gauteng holding: the range must be walkable and visible from the homestead, and it must have a lockable overnight position. A range designed purely for bird behaviour, sited out of sight behind a koppie, will be emptied by people rather than by raptors.

Gauteng also carries 24.8% of South Africa's laying hens — 7 679 022 birds, the highest of any province (SAPA Industry Profile 2023, Table 10). You are designing a range inside the densest poultry region in the country, which matters for the next lesson.

Contested — here is both sides

Is a legally compliant free-range flock better off than a well-run barn flock in South Africa?

The case for free range: birds get natural light, dust bathing, foraging, exercise and behavioural choice. Those are real welfare goods that no barn provides, and the SAPA Code's own reasoning points the same way — it requires overhead cover precisely because a bird with somewhere to retreat is a calmer bird.

The case against, stated at full strength: South Africa's legally compliant free-range flock may be run at 5 hens/m² outdoors with 40 cm² of shade per bird. That is a recipe for a denuded, sun-baked, parasite-loaded range on which birds are heat-stressed, exposed to raptors, and — on the Phillips evidence — mostly not using the range anyway. A well-managed barn flock with good ventilation, litter, perches and nesting may measurably out-perform it on welfare.

Where this lands: the welfare gain comes from range quality and area, not from the label. Nobody has run the SA study that would settle it — no comparison of welfare outcomes between compliant free-range and barn flocks in South African conditions could be found — so this is a reasoned inference from the stocking and shade standards rather than a measured result. But it is the honest reading, and it is why the design test above matters more than the compliance certificate.

#Keeping the label through a confinement period

There will be seasons when you have to bring the birds inside. The regulation anticipates this and gives you a specific allowance with a specific cost attached.

Read the trigger before you plan around it. Cold is not on the list. The allowance runs during an avian influenza high-risk period or a virulent Newcastle disease outbreak, so routine winter housing against frost is not obviously inside it at all, and you should not assume it is.

Then work it against the season, because the two collide. On the Highveld the frost-free window runs roughly 15 August to 26 May on modelled climate data for Meyerton (WeatherSpark), so the range is nutritionally empty from about June to mid-August. And every one of South Africa's major poultry avian influenza events has begun in autumn or early winter — the dates are in the next lesson. Your coldest weeks and your highest-risk weeks are the same weeks, so a single event can eat most of a 24-week allowance in one go. Count them. Keep a dated register from day one; regs 8(2)(b) and (c) require it, and it is also the only way you will know how many weeks you have left.

#What to do on Monday

Walk your range at two in the afternoon on the next hot day and count how many birds are out. If the number looks like Phillips's 14%, you do not have a stocking-density problem or a breed problem — you have a shade problem, and it is fixable with shade cloth and posts before it is fixable with anything else. Then measure the shade you actually have, compare it to 0.1 m² per bird rather than to 40 cm², and start the confinement register today, whether or not you are confining anything.

#Check yourself

3 questions — answers explained as you go

1South African law permits a free-range flock at 5 adult hens per square metre outdoors. What does that work out to per hectare, and how does it compare with the EU?
Why: Five hens per square metre times 10 000 square metres is 50 000 hens per hectare. Commission Regulation (EC) No 589/2008, Annex II §1(c) caps EU free-range open-air runs at one hen per 4 m², which is 2 500 per hectare. A South African consumer reading "free range" and a European consumer reading it are being told about two systems that differ by a factor of twenty. A genuinely pastured operation vastly exceeds the SA standard — and gets no label credit for it, because the regulations forbid you from saying so on the carton.
2Your range meets the legal shade requirement of 4 m² per 1 000 hens. Why is that not enough?
Why: Divide 4 square metres by 1 000 birds and you get 40 square centimetres each. The regulation requires less shade per bird than the bird physically occupies. Since ranging falls as solar radiation rises, and Highveld solar radiation is higher than in the Minnesota study where that was measured, the hours when birds most need shade are exactly the hours the legal figure cannot cover. Design to the test — every bird in shade at once during the hottest two hours of a December day — and treat the regulation as a floor with no biological meaning.
3You confine your free-range layers indoors on 1 May because of an avian influenza scare, and let them out again on 15 November. What happens to your eggs?
Why: 1 May to 15 November is about 28 weeks, which breaches reg 8(2)(a)(ii)(bb)'s 24-continuous-week cap. The consequence is not a fine in the first instance — it is the loss of your only permitted production claim, and a notification duty to the assignee, your distribution channels and your customers under regs 8(2)(b) and (c). This is why the register matters: winter housing and disease-response housing come out of the same 24 weeks, and nobody counts them until it is too late.