The foods we eat have been a changing ever since people stopped producing their own food and industrial agriculture took over about 70 years ago. 200 years back most people lived on farms and were producing their own food to eat, but that number gradually decreased once technological breakthroughs allowed producing food on a very large scale and the food industry exploded. And so did industrial animal agriculture.
When industrial animal agriculture emerged
The technological advancements in farming equipment enabled farmers to produce more food over a shorter length of time, which represented an important development in agriculture because there was now the solution of feeding a population that multiplied faster than ever before.
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It wasn’t only the use of motorized farming equipment and biotechnology that shaped factory farming, but changes in animal housing also occurred. Indoor facilities were developed to house farm animals in groups and raising animals in confinement became a trademark in animal farming. Farmers were able to monitor animals more efficiently, and the battery cage system facilitated animal care and labor.
Intensive food production would become the world’s food system.
Industrial poultry farming and mass egg production
In poultry farming, chickens are raised either for meat or for eggs. In the meat industry, chickens live in confinement, sometimes as many as tens of thousands of chickens put together in a warehouse-like facility.
Chickens used for eggs live in similar conditions, although egg-laying hens are packed in groups of 5 to 10 in battery cages to control and maximize production. Egg production is among the most intensive of all factory farming. An egg-laying hen produces over 250 eggs per year nowadays, whereas a century ago per year production was limited to 100 eggs.
Artificial methods are commonly used to yield more production, including starving hens. The process known as forced-molting implies deprivation of food and this physiological shock is systematically applied to chickens to force egg-laying.
The cage free – free range dilemma
People often buy cage-free and/or free-range eggs based on the assumption that they are purchasing something different to mass-produced products. The terms are often used interchangeably, and most people assume they relate to hens that were raised outdoors and allowed their fundamental behavioral needs.
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But “cage-free” and “free-range” refer to two different ways of raising chickens and producing eggs.
- When a label reads cage-free eggs, this assumes chickens were kept cage-free and were allowed to perform natural behaviors such as wing-flapping and perching. It also assumes that hens were not submitted to beak-cutting or forced-molting. However, cage-free chickens can still be confined in very close quarters with no access to the outdoors.
- Free-range eggs are different to cage-free eggs in that chickens are granted access outside, but there are no specifications regarding duration or the type of outdoor access. For example, a label can read “free-range” even for hens packed in large warehouses where a door is provided for chickens to get outside, in a controlled environment.