Sometimes, genius just flows out of me - I’m sure I’m not the only one. Like when my dad had the idea for flip-top toothpaste back before it was a thing.
I buy free-range eggs, each to their own. While cooking an omelet this morning I get to thinking that the blurb sounds to me like pure marketing spin, e.g:
Ooh, a “barn” you say!. How nice, a quant little wooden shed out in the countryside, perhaps with sunshine streaming in. The French version, unsurprisingly, sounds very fancy-schmancy
OMG, i have actually thought about the same thing. 24/7 streams from different animal nests are currently really popular, also the concept of “pick your own food” is getting increasingly more trendy.
With small coop you could keep the production costs low - maybe even low enough to be covered by just the income you’d be getting from the stream - and what you’d get from selling the eggs themself would be just extra.
Without trying to be morbid, this simply wouldn’t work because marketability of a product like eggs heavily relies on the production circumstances being inaccessible to the consumer. There are no farms with chickens living under the conditions you are describing, whom you can buy eggs from in your local supermarket, not even the ‘organic’ ones. In order to make eggs an affordable product, the living conditions of the hens basically automatically become non-marketable.
It’s a pretty deep rabbit hole, which you don’t have to get into. Each to their own, if you want to buy organic eggs over the regular ones, that is certainly a better choice, but after looking up some things, I stopped consuming any kinds of egg, unless I’ve seen the living conditions of the hens with my own eyes.
Ι guess the only problem with the whole idea is that they can easily bait-and-switch the product.
You buy some eggs and they show you live feed from an outdoor savvy free-range, organic, eco-friendly, renewably biodiverse and whatever other buzzword is now trending, facility.
Cool, but how do you know that those eggs you are now holding came from over there?
Unless you go and pick them up yourself (which would make bait and switch too cumbersome for the owners), you just can’t know.
There are already food safety and quality assurance systems in place. We can’t know for sure that our food is safe, but the issues of concern regarding eggs are not completely unknowable, either. I think your doubt would be too extreme if you’re looking at a live stream for Happy Farms, and holding in your hand a dozen eggs from Happy Farms. It’s not absolutely certain knowledge, but it’s not worthless.
