Thursday, January 28, 2016

Cage free eggs won't be cheap

Right now, the US market has about 300 million laying hens, and only about eight percent of them are cage-free, according to this story in Wired.

Chickens_2-01 
In 2014, the US as a whole produced nearly 100 billion eggs, totaling $10.2 billion in revenue. This kind of mass production depends on cages. With those tiny wire boxes, farmers can micromanage everything about a bird’s life. They can even help automate egg collection by forcing the bird to lay its eggs directly into a funnel that drops down into a collection area.

Today, eggs are widely available and cheap mostly because of caging systems.

2 comments:

Paula said...

Good article. Shows how trying to do better and better got so crazy, sort of my theme lately. Protecting chickens = good. Keeping them in cages so small they can't stand up for their whole life = bad. Where was the common sense?

Norma said...

I suspect they'll need a new breeding program to create poultry that isn't dependent on antibiotics. However, they are pretty vicious and can injure each other. I suppose that requires some selective breeding too. UK has about 45% cage free according to another article.