Jo I see you get the SciFy channel, might want to back off on the doobies you are starting to confuse TV and reality

Jo - You are expressing your fear. Where do you get your information that makes you so afraid? Chickens for laying eggs do not get either steroids or growth hormones.

These are emotional, popular "boogie man" terms but do not relate to fact. Laying hens in modern chicken houses are fed a nutritionally balanced diet that is quite sophisticated. The diet is adjusted for temperature (that can vary a bit inside the house depending upon time of year), age of the laying hen, shell quality (thick or thinning - crack rate), and egg size. There are not given any steroids or hormones.

As for salmonella, the Veterinary Department at the University of Missouri from a PhD in Vet Pathology states that chickens are scavengers that will eat whatever does not eat them. If in their scavenging, they pick up an organism containing salmonella, it will be passed onto the egg. And I quote, "It is much more likely that a range-free chicken will come into contact with salmonella than a caged, housed chicken."

Sounds great there jkatze!! Problem is we've run most of them out of business while we subsidize factory farms and pay the few family farmers we haven't bankrupted to let their land go unused. Great system we have. We'll prop up defunct car companies, banks and insurance companies who threw their money away, and any other business or group that can pony up some votes but as the family farmer was dying we did nothing to encourage him and his descendent's to continue doing what they had done for hundreds of years - feed us. Reminds me of a John Cougar-Melloncamp song. I grew up on the farm in Southern Indiana among the corn and the wheat fields and I watched the family farm die first hand and it was sickening. I watched folks whose families had lived on the same land for generations pack up and move away because they could no longer compete with the government subsidized factory farms that continued to gobble up the land for pennies on the dollar because the owners had been forced into bankruptcy by tight credit, high seed and fuel costs and skyrocketing equipment costs. I knew men that hung themselves in their barns, my great-grandfather among them. No one cared then and they don't now. It sounds good and all talking about buying local food, and eggs and milk and such but it's not going to happen on any scale. Oh a few people will but most do it because it's fashionable and so they can sit around with their friends and brag about how "green" they are and how they're saving the planet and all. Most of their food will still come from WalMart. There's simply not enough interest to support more than a small farm or two in any given area. Farming is expensive, hard, dirty, daylight to dark, 24/7/365 work and the plain fact is that most people today aren't going to lower their standard of living to do it. Those days are gone and they're not coming back. Sad but it is what it is.

The estate tax (the Democrat keystone) destroyed the family farm. The kids just can't come up with the taxes on the estate after dad dies. And the subsidizes supposed the help them wind up enriching the factory farms because they can afford the lawyer to interpret them funny how those who claim (the Dem's DFL) to help,.. have destroyed the family farm and enriched the corporation. Or maybe that was their plan, destroy the backbone of America.

Support local farmers markets. I am lucky enough to live in an area where we have a good system in place and a farmers market is available 6 days a week. Why? Because the locals here believe in it and want to put the money in the farmers pockets not the pockets of some middle man. We have two or three farmers who raise chickens as a side business to the orchards or fields that they propagate. We are able to buy eggs and meat from these farmers. The chickens are raised in pasture where they can eat bugs and plants as well as their feed. The eggs have bright orange yolks which according to a study on mother earth news contains more nutrients than the eggs of battery caged hens. (look it up on their website).

localharvest.org is a website you can use to look for local farm raised food and farmers markets. Don't wait for our government to fix a system that is too giant to fix. Spend your money on food that is produced on a smaller scale. I understand that problems can happen on any farm, but for me, it feels like a better bet when things are on a smaller scale and someone is watching because their livelyhood depends on it.

Last point I'll make. Some food sold at a farmers markets will be a little pricier than food grown on a large scale but think about the fact that you are paying for a small farmer to be able to do what he does. A giant egg producer shoves hundreds of thousands of chickens into small cages. Douses them with antibiotics because these are far from sterile conditions and feeds them feed that includes meat and bone meal (when I read that in the MSNBC article from a couple of days ago, I had to wonder: chickens eating chicken? Even if not, that's how they think we got mad cow. Cows eating who knows who). A small farmer feeds his chickens grains and lets them get their protein in a yard or pasture while they soak up vitamin D in the sunshine. The latter example is more overhead just from a real estate standpoint, but worth every penny you pay for it with more nutritious eggs with no antibiotics used.

The Veterinary Department at the University of Missouri from a PhD in Vet Pathology states that chickens are scavengers that will eat whatever does not eat them. If in their scavenging, they pick up an organism containing salmonella, it will be passed onto the egg. And I quote, "It is much more likely that a range-free chicken will come into contact with salmonella than a caged, housed chicken."

Can't you agree though, Frostbyte, that the chickens are kept in deplorable conditions. Conditions so awful that if humans were placed in them, it would be called a concentration camp? I think, even for a simple animal mind, the surroundings are hellish and miserable, and that the stress and lack of exercise and lack of natural food is not making a particularly healthy product.

Right on

The estate tax (the Democrat keystone) destroyed the family farm.

And how many of those family farms your saying were destroyed by the inheritance tax (I am assuming you mean the one from 1916 with the top rate raise in 1934 and not the previous ones) were actually worth the 5 million dollars needed to qualify for that tax? That hardly sounds like the little guy to me.

Conglomerate companies and greed destroyed Americas farm industry. They drown the little guy out.

They can't be everywhere at once. Close enough for government work.

The Veterinary Department at the University of Missouri from a PhD in Vet Pathology states that chickens are scavengers that will eat whatever does not eat them. If in their scavenging, they pick up an organism containing salmonella, it will be passed onto the egg. And I quote, "It is much more likely that a range-free chicken will come into contact with salmonella than a caged, housed chicken."