Kid (OP), you shoulda lurked longer. 
BC, like most of the provinces, doesn’t provide much dignity for its chickens. And egg carton labels can say pretty much anything they want except for “Certified” - this is the only guarantee of a third-party audit of the producer, ensuring that the farm is up to the standards of its claims.
“Cage-free” is, as many have noted, pretty much a joke. “Barn” chickens are little better off than their caged counterparts… Overcrowding, “fowled” water and food, still no sunlight. Layers are still unable to achieve the physical behavior of healthy poultry, like stretching, flapping wings, nesting. This is not due only to minimizing land use and barn size - if the chickens move around more, they require more energy in the form of food. Food is money. Their beaks must still be trimmed or they will attack their sisters; the leading cause of death is feather plucking. Sad. An acid test of happy chickens is natural beaks yet no evidence of feather plucking or cannibalism.
The only positive thing here is, I believe, that the male chicks become broilers, not ground up alive. Wait… is that such a positive thing??
What breed were they? There are egg-laying breeds, meat breads, and dual purpose. The last are popular on small and hobby farms for obvious reasons but if you had a bunch of Leghorns, the lower-quality meat would not be a surprise. Chickens off of egg farms get turned into Campbells Soup.
I think y’all need a little education on chickens and another one of their “products” - their shit.
You see all manure is a potential fertilizer. In the farm world the best manure is from chickens, next is from hogs, finally their is cow manure.
Now when chickens are confined to a single area their manure is very easy to obtain. You just scoop it up and spread it out on the fields. Now with “free range” that gets a bit harder since they run around the area pooping.
Now alot of you say “so what?”. Well think about this you all “organic” people. Well what exactly is “organic”? Well its crops that dont use commercial fertilizers - right? Well if you cant get fertilizer from other farm animals like a chicken coop or a hog lot, where are you going to get it?
So thew reality is that commercial chicken operations - where the chickens are caged, are necessary if you want organic crops.
Or you can just make your chickens’ free range your crop fields to begin with, and skip the step of having to gather it and re-spread it.
Actually, on a large, intensive scale, the hazards of chicken shit exceeds its value. Farmers and their families have died in poultry manure pits. The more you are around ammonia, the less able you are to detect even dangerous levels.
ETA: I was in a large commercial laying house once. We wore ventilators to deal with the dust. From one end of the building, you couldn’t see the other end due to dust.
Well another thing about chickens, humans are not the only ones who find them tasty. Hawks, raccoons, dogs, and just about any other predator will go after them.
Thats partly why they are kept in cages or enclosures.
I’ve raised my own laying hens for 25 years. Only for my family and friends. These are a few facts about chickens:
The best tasting eggs, by far and away, are from true, free range, pastured hens. The closer they are to being able to roam freely to forage, the better their eggs taste. I am not a real subtle foodie type (most veggies taste the same to me however they’re grown, for example), but the difference is blatantly obvious even to me. The whole texture and color is different as well. Pasture eggs’ yolks are deep orange, not yellow. They stand up high . The whites are thicker, the shells are much thicker, even hard to crack.
Don’t confuse commercial meat chickens with commercial laying hens. Meat chickens are raised loose in giant houses. They never roost nor sleep. Lights on 24 hrs so they eat continually. They are a highly specialized hybrid with huge breasts. They are ready to butcher in 6 weeks from hatching.
Commercial laying hens are high-strung skinny birds which never make good eating at any time of their lives. They too live in perpetual daylight, but for something like 12 months from onset of lay. Then they are dispatched, as they have been reamed out and exhausted.
Taking commercial laying hens out of their cages and raising them like broilers only subjects them to the cannibalistic behavior inherent in any crowded stressed chicken population. It’s another ignorant do-gooder solution which only creates a different problem. My experience is that hens need a LOT of room in order that the ones on the bottom of the literal pecking order do not get damaged by the hens ranked above them (just like people, it is the hens one rung up who are the most aggressive).
True pastured eggs are possible on a commercial scale (but probably not the mega-commercial modern scale), but you have to be creative. For one thing, the pasture area must be continually moved so fresh roaming area is available as chickens quickly destroy pasture if left on it (they scratch it to pieces). A solution many have found to work well is a laying/roosting coop on wheels, which is hauled via tractor to new sites.The pastures are usually fenced with electrified portable plastic mesh fencing. I use this myself, it is great stuff.
Predators are a big concern with pastured hens. The netting keeps out quadrupeds but not raptors. Some people use guardian dogs as with sheep; I’ve heard good things at least about smaller flock protection that way.
Egg production is completely dependent on day length, which is why lay houses are lit all the time. Because pastured hens are not artificially lit, they follow a natural schedule of a burst of spring laying followed by a gradual decrease after the solstice. Second-year and older layers generally stop laying during the darkest months. Since they still have to be fed while producing nothing, most commercial free-range egg farmers sell their year old hens in late fall. I often get my replacement hens this way as, not having been abused, they still have a couple or three pretty good years of lay in them, just fine for a home flock. A hen of any breed is pretty well spent after four years of age and she is a stewpot chicken after that.
This is exactly why many free range hens are in orchards. They also are used effectively as co-residents in cow pastures as they eat the fly eggs/maggots laid in the cowpats, keeping down the fly population, a serious problem in any livestock operation.
Also, hens roost at night, and a lot of their poop is deposited under the roosts, easily obtained even if they are ranging during the day.
Where I live many families keep several chickens, sometimes selling them to neighbors etc. “House chickens” are sometimes sold in the markets (at a price much higher than market chickens); my wife tells me it’s easy to distinguish them from “market chickens”: the former are skinnier.
An advantage of keeping chickens is they act as scavengers, gobbling up scraps of food and thus cleaning the yard! We used to have some chickens, but got rid of them, partly due to fears of the bird flu epidemic, partly because our dogs enjoyed killing and eating them. :smack:
Our dogs still kill the occasional neighbor chicken, and sometimes get poisoned by the neighbor in return. Careful: A few of the chickens around here are fighting roosters which can be worth hundreds of dollars. :eek:
Just out of curiosity, where do you think the nutritional content of eggs from free range layers originates if not from their diet?
Wait he said Levis not Wranglers
I like the thin shelled eggs for hard boiling, easier to peal.
What you want for easy peeling is weeks-old eggs. Thickness of shell doesn’t matter but old eggs (commercial eggs all qualify despite the ‘farm fresh’ on the label) have developed an air space between the shell and the white so they are a cinch to peel. Freshly laid eggs are very very difficult to peel. I have to resort to peeling them under a stream of cold water and even then the results are far from ideal.
Do you have an unbiased source to support the claim that commercial eggs are old? Googling gives a wide array of numbers, all appearing to be from vested interests (commercial farmers saying they are only a couple of days old) or clickbait type sources (scare stories saying they may be six weeks old).
I can’t really think of any obvious reason why commercial eggs would be old? Demand does not vary seasonally and is probably highly predictable, and indoor battery farms can be located anywhere. Long-distance transportation and storage cost money.
I can’t either, and I don’t know exactly how old they have to be, to be easy to peel. But three day old eggs are very hard to peel. And two week old eggs are real easy. Store eggs are almost always easy to peel. That’s the sum of what I know.
Googling:
Here is a foodie website called Serious Eats, which purports to discuss the science behind hard boiling eggs. Agreeing that old eggs peel easier, it also says
“The age of an egg does make a difference, but only when the eggs are super fresh: freshly laid eggs are more likely to stick to the shell. In the U.S., eggs can sit for up to 30 days before being packaged, and the sell-by date can be a further 30 days after that, which means that most likely, the eggs you’re getting at the supermarket are old enough that no further aging at home should be necessary.”
Well, yes, I found many sites ominously stating the maximum allowable age for supermarket eggs, but of course that’s doesn’t tell us anything.