We should have a bumper crop this year as we are starting out fresh with all new hens.
First off, I need to make sure that our customers understand the USDA’s definition of “free range” and “Organic”.
“free range”
The USDA requires that “free-range” animals have access to outdoor areas, but there is no provision for how long they must spend or how much room they must have outside. The Associated Press reported that the USDA’s regulations don’t “require the birds to actually spend ANY time outdoors, only to have access.” Even if a farmer opened the door to a coop with thousands of birds inside and then closed it before any chickens went outside, he would still be able to use the free-range label.
‘Organic’
Eggs, and dairy products labeled “organic” have been regulated by the USDA since 2002 and must “come from animals [who] are given no antibiotics or growth hormones.” Farms, processors, and distributors must be inspected by the USDA before they are allowed to use the “organic” label. However, less than 1 percent of chickens are raised in accordance with these standards. One farmer complained, “Organic is a straightjacket with too many constraints.”
The USDA cautions consumers that the “organic” label should not be confused with or likened to “natural” or any other label, and it “makes no claims that organically produced food is safer or more nutritious than conventionally produced food.”
Like the “free-range” label, the “organic” label does not guarantee that animals were treated any better than animals raised in conventional factory farms. An eyewitness revealed that on a so-called organic farm that advertised that its hens were raised in a “natural setting,” the birds were actually crammed “wall to wall—6,800 chickens with one rooster for every hundred hens. They never set foot outside.
The industry standard for “where eggs come from”
Packed in battery cages eating chemical laiden food that contains the remains of their dead brothers and sisters!
This is where OUR hens are “confined”.
Emmas arms! She has made pets of most of the girls and she delights in treating them all like her own children! They even ride in the sled with her when it’s snowy!
They have 24/7 access to well over 100 acres, and they spend all day in the sun scratching for seeds, chasing bugs, eating GREEN grass and drinking well water.
This is a quick snap of some of the “ladies” having a nap in the forest this past fall.
OK… I’ll hop off of my soap box for tonight, but I am far from finished! 
