Free-Range Futures

It saddens me to think of how today’s commercial producers keep laying hens in confinement with minimal space. In 2008, California passed Proposition 2 with the intent of improving confinement conditions. Indeed, tight quarters for laying hens have improved across the U.S., but in the early days (when I was a youngster), chickens were kept in high-fence pastures and often with sheep or other livestock. The hens had rows of small colony houses that provided roosting boards and nest boxes. The chickens spent most of the day outside in the pasture.

The colony houses were starting to disappear when I was a boy, because gathering hundreds of eggs from each little 10-by-12foot house was time-consuming and sometimes hens would simply lay eggs in the pasture.

Later, we built long redwood henhouses that housed many more hens. The long houses that everyone began to use had wood floors and long but narrow adjoining rooms with as many as 500 leghorn hens per room. For feeding and egg gathering, the longer houses reduced labor. All the hens still had access to the outside during the day.

As a schoolboy, I rode the bus home in early afternoon and helped with feeding and gathering eggs. My grandfather had a large commercial egg-washing and sorting machine. The washed and dried eggs were put in flats that held 21⁄2 dozen eggs. Everything was done by hand.

All the hens were of the Leghorn breed and all the eggs were typical of the white-shelled eggs you see in grocery stores today. It might sound funny, but I was about 12 years old before I ever saw a brown egg. I didn’t even know they existed!