Range Fed vrs Free Run vrs Free Range

Here is what, in Alberta, the chicken industry thinks about Free Run and Free range. I won't put words in their mouth, this is what they say. Think about it - are their pictures showing the average or the best case scenarios?

• Alberta eggs free run aviary housing
• Alberta eggs free run barn housing
• Alberta eggs free range housingI can tell you - the grass there means the pictures were taken within hours of the chickens being let out - a few hours after these pictures were taken, it would have been brown dirt or mud.

If you checked those links out, you can probably see why we don't use the terms Free-Run or Free-Range though all our animals except quail are certainly both Free-Run and Free-Range by those definitions! You can, of course, decide whether that makes enough of a difference for you to pay the premium price over cage raised chickens.

And we don't claim to be purists - 2017 update: we don't range feed our Quail. We raise our quail in cages sized for 7 to 10 adult quail per cage and only give some access to outside experiences in seasonally convenient times. Unfortunately, a range-fed Coturnix Quail is either dead by wildlife or dead by escaping and dying because of an inability to survive in the wild - it has been domesticated for too many years and they are small enough there are just too many predators. We tried 3 times and all 3 times, all were killed by predators. There is probably a way we could do it, and we have puzzled it, but we have not come up with any even remotely financially reasonable ways. (We have some completely financially crazy ways - but we aren't doing those.) We'll keep thinking.

But for the animals like chickens that we CAN reasonably raise range-fed (sheep, chickens, muscovys) we do.