Why free range eggs

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According to All About Eggs by Rachel Khong, cage-free facilities have more hen-on-hen violence and lower air quality than facilities that use cages. Free-range , another USDA term, means that the eggs come from hens that have some sort of access to the outdoors. For eggs to be Local, they must come from a flock located less than four hundred miles from the processing facility or within the same state. And for eggs to be Organic , the only stipulation is that they must come from hens who are fed an organic diet.

Amount of space per hen, access to the outdoors — neither of those are specified or required, though many organic eggs are also at least free-range. So depending on the context, vegetarian-fed can actually be the lesser of two evils.

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List of Partners vendors. Featured Video. Read More. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for thespruceeats. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. Between 40 and 80 hens are housed in each cage, with little more than a postcard size of extra space compared to a standard battery cage. Although enrichment, such as nesting screens, scratch pads, and perches are provided, the reality is that most birds are unable to access them due to strict pecking orders in the colony.

As a result, many hens are denied the freedom to carry out natural behaviours like scratching, dust-bathing and roosting. However, the images of happy hens exploring rich green foliage and preening their thick brown feathers are incredibly misleading. Descended from wild jungle fowl more than 8, years ago, modern hens have been selectively bred to produce unnaturally high numbers of eggs for human consumption.

Hybrid breeds include the Golden Comet, Leghorn, Australorp and Rhode Island Red, who unlike chickens bred for meat otherwise known as broilers , are prized for their eggs a year — which is around 20 times more than their wild ancestors. Whether caged, free-range, or organic, the consequences are the same — egg peritonitis infection and inflammation in the abdominal cavity , prolapses, osteoporosis, keel bone fractures due to a lack of calcium, and even cancer.

Unlike birds reared in caged systems, free-range hens must have access to the outdoors. The barns, or rather industrial sheds, in which these birds spend the vast majority of their short lives are severely overcrowded, usually artificially lit and have high levels of ammonia due to waste build-up.

Housing tens of thousands of birds in a single unit leads to widespread respiratory disorders — infectious bronchitis IB and infectious bursal disease being the two most common. IB will usually infect every bird in a flock once it takes hold and can lead to the deaths of a quarter of all birds in the flock. As more supermarkets pledge to go free-range by , the size of these units are getting bigger — with multi-tiered systems on the rise.

Previous investigations carried out by Viva! At one free-range farm there were numerous hens, practically bald from extensive feather-pecking, that never ventured outside.