Jeff's concern with the "free range" chicken and eggs and wanting to eat them with a clear conscious.

I am vegetarian, but until a few months ago relied on eggs to supplement my protein intake.  I went to a vegetarian festival where I picked up literature on chicken farming and learned about the debeaking process, where chicken's beaks are ripped off my machines to keep chickens from attacking each other.  I was horrified.

I no longer eat eggs.  I live in a more urban area where it isn't feasible to get fresh eggs from a farmer who I know are treating the chickens humanely.  If I end up moving to a more rural area, I would consider finding a local farmer who raises chickens humanely.

What about the label "cage-free" on eggs? Does that have any meaning? In my case, I do happen to know enough about the local producer to know that their cage-free chickens' eggs are as advertised ... but I'd like to know officially if the term has meaning.

If you're a vegetarian because you're against killing animals, you should consider giving up eggs altogether. Even the "most free" chickens don't reach a happy old age; once they can't lay eggs anymore, that's it... I've become vegan for reasons like this; I eat soy/tofu products for protein, and feel a lot healthier/ more energetic since dairy stuff doesn't clog up my system any more...

I am not the authority on these matters, but here's my understanding.

-Cage-free has no legal meaning, like "organic" does.  These producers need to be careful of a false advertising claim, but they can also create a pretty weak definition.

-"Free Range" does have some standing with the USDA, in that to be labeled as such there must be certified access to the outdoors.   This can be very minimal and the chickens do not have to take advantage of it.

If you feed a few hens off your kitchen scraps for a while, give them a little house and a patch of ground to scratch around on (it doesn't take much, or you can even rotate them through parts of your garden) then you will know what real, fresh free-range eggs taste like and you will never be fooled again.  There are obstacles to putting this solution into effect but it is good to face those, as they might just be the same obstacles to your living a healthy, natural life in general. So in any case, trying to do it is a good exercise.

Thanks to CowsEatGrass for mentioning localharvest.org.  And thanks to Umbra for dealing with what is really more an animal-rights issue than an environmental issue.

I agree that visiting the chicken farm is desirable, if not always practical.  Nevertheless, my feeling is that as more and more consumers choose eggs labeled as from "free-range" chickens, regardless of the sincerity of that labeling as things are now, consumer pressure will force a degree of regulation and compliance.

Our eggs are from Farmer Green's Egg Farm in Freehold, NJ.  Farmer Green claims on the box that the eggs are "from free-roaming hens with a healthy diet": "Hens are free to roam, exercise, and live in a natural environment" (I am not quite sure we all have the same thing in mind when we consider a chicken's "natural environment" -- running through the jungles of Southeast Asia?), and that they eat "pure nutritional grains."  With Umbra's encouragement, I shall indeed look more closely into Farmer Green's operation.

by refusing to eat their products
we can do more good than in any other single
action
just vow not to until the world demands
humane standards for raising animals
you'll feel better healthwise and soulwise
if you do.......
we shall overcome only if we all stand up together

My wife and I just recently started selling eggs from our little homestead. I was amazed out how different our eggs looked from store bought and wanted to share as well as recoup some of the cost of feed bedding etc. I was concerned about labeling our eggs as "free-range" so I got online and did some research of the term. Boy was I disappointed in what some producers get away with! We take pride in our girls and the eggs they produce. Our girls roam over the 4 acres and the eggs show it. If your not sure if the eggs you get are truly "free-range" do a simple test. Buy some store eggs and crack them in a bowl with one of the free-range eggs. You should be able to tell very easily if the hen really does get to eat different foods. If the yoke is not a golden orange color but is the same pale yellow then don't eat it! And just because the eggs are brown don't assume they are free-range either.
Another point, if the producer advertises tender free-range chicken meat you know their birds are not free-range. Sorry but you can't have free-range and tender, the two terms are mutually exclusive. A free range bird has to be able to move around to find food and this builds up muscle. A healthy bird has some nice firm meat. As state earlier, most producers are using Cornish-X birds for meat production and these birds have had all their instinct bred right out of them. They are so stupid they will die of thirst three feet from the waterer. So ask the producer what kind of birds they have if they say Cornish then go somewhere else. Look for something like Road Island Reds or New Hampshire Reds basically any bird that still has enough since in it to survive outside.
Always check the eggs and the producer, don't believe what anybody tells you. Ask for photo's if you can't travel to the farm yourself. In this day and age they should have no problems sending them to you.

This column is almost 2 years old and the previous response from April '07, but I felt it was important to respond.  I belonged to FFA throughout high school and graduated from UC Davis.  I also am an organic, natural nut living in the Bay Area.  I started a small batch of hens about 4 years ago for fresh eggs and continue to enjoy these eggs from the same hens and their daughters.  There is absolutely no comparison in the taste between farm eggs and industrial eggs.  The latter taste like cardboard to me.  I also just finished out and processed 21 Cornish-x red broilers - my first ever attempt at raising my own meat - and would like to dispel some misinformation in the column and some of the responses.  First of all, the cornish-x birds ARE genetically designed to gain weight fast.  They are basically eating machines.  The reason the cornish-x birds available in stores are are ready for slaughter in 4 to 6 weeks (sometimes 6-8 weeks for the roasters) is because they are under lights sometimes up to 23 hours a day.  You give them the opportunity to eat and they will do so non-stop.  IF you raise them according to more natural rhythms, they don't gain weight as fast which doesn't stress out their cardiovascular systems or overwhelm their joints.  Because I started my batch at the beginning of October, I needed to keep them under a heat lamp until they had real feathers and then some on the really cold nights (<35F).  After they were able to keep warm naturally by sleeping next to each other, they ate only when there was daylight and slept at night.  At night, they slept in an enclosed, protected space and during the day, they foraged, dust bathed, and ran(yes, I mean "ran" not walked) around in my yard.  They got a certain amount of food per day (organic only) and once it was gone, that was it.  I monitored their weight by randomly grabbing chickens and feeling the sharpness or lack thereof of the keelbones.  I processed mine just after the middle of the month in January.  They were 3.5 months old - the hens averaged about 5 lbs after processing and the roosters about 6-7 pounds.  I actually waited a little too long to process as my roosters started to crow and harass the hens during the last week and a half.  SO, they will grow only as fast or slow as how much you feed them and how many hours a day they are allowed to eat.  These chickens cost me between 1.75 and 2 bucks per pound to raise.  Unfortunately, it is very hard for poultry producers to be economically viable raising organic, pastured poultry unless they are lucky to find a niche market.  The money is in the volume.  Another misconception is that these birds are too stupid to survive outside of a broiler house.  Well, mine were definitely not as smart as my backyard chickens (the egg layers and attending roosters), but they got along just fine.  They went back to the chicken house just after dark, had no problems finding water, were able to forage independently over varied terrain (tall grass, shrubbery, ditch with water in it), and came when I called.  I started with 25 day old chicks, lost two early on and two others to predators later (one of them probably to a predator of the human variety).  I think they were probably some of the happiest broiler chickens ever with only one bad day in their entire lives. I have been wanting to try this grand chicken experiment for awhile now and only after I found a local small USDA processor did it become a reality.  I know how to slaughter, but it's a really messy job so I'm fine leaving it to someone else.  The facility I found also uses a more humane method of slaughter than the big industrial facilities so this was an added bonus.  It cost me $2.75 per bird.  The work of keeping these birds was not really that challenging and actually very minor compared to what I thought it would be.  After the birds reached a certain age, they were pretty much on auto-pilot.  All I had to do was feed and water.  I will definitely be doing this again once we get through our current batch (in the freezer) because I am here to tell you that home grown, pastured, organic HAPPY chicken is the best damn tasting chicken in the ENTIRE WORLD and nothing can compete with it.  I hope I've inspired some "food for thought" with these comments :-)