Kiera Butler
Mother Jones
The chickens pictured on the egg producer Chino Valley Ranchers’ Simply Organic site look pretty happy. And from the description of their digs, it sounds like they’d have good reason to be: “When you walk into the chicken houses and you see all the birds scratching around in the dirt, running around, flapping their wings and hear the soft clucking from each of them, you can feel their contentment,” the copy below the little fuzzballs reads. “It is the way nature intended.”
An industrial henhouse jam-packed with 36,000 birds, on the other hand, is probably not “the way nature intended.” But that is exactly what investigators from the organic food advocacy group Cornucopia Institute found when they visited a Wisconsin henhouse that supplies Chino Valley Ranchers with organic eggs.
And Chino Valley isn’t alone. A recent Cornucopia investigation revealed that conditions at many facilities that produce organic eggs are often just as crowded and industrial as those at conventional egg farms. And although US organic standards require outdoor access for laying hens, Cornucopia found that at many organic farms, “outdoors” often consists of nothing more than a tiny concrete screen porch adjoining the tenement-like henhouse.
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