Some "free range" chickens live in a semi-confined environment where there is a passageway in and out of the chicken confinement house, but it's soooo small that the chickens often don't see the outdoors. How the heck those chickens are "free range" I'll never understand.
This is part of the reason why it has been on my heart to raise chickens myself. I had a chicken in my backyard for a few weeks. She sort of wondered into my yard one day and stuck around. I believe my neighbor's dogs probably killed her like they have killed several feral cats in the neighborhood. While she hung around, however, I learned that most of what a chicken eats already lives in the ground. The lentils and millet that I gave her, she would have as a treat. Keep in mind, this happened at a time when I thought that the best thing to feed chickens is grain.
Someone posted a picture of two eggs on facebook. One egg was from a confined grain fed chicken and the other was from a free range chicken who ate what lived in the ground. The egg yolks appeared so different in color. The sickly egg was a soft yellow color while the well nourished egg was a bold deep orange color. I've been so aware of what the eggs that I buy look like since then. I would look to see if the yolks were yellow or deep orange. Many of them were somewhere in between which I still find disturbing.
If I raise my own, at least I KNOW they will be nutritious eggs. I don't have to rely on another and wonder if the chickens have ever been confined, fed GMOs or worse.
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