This Former Industrial Chicken Farmer Wants to Go Big With Pasture-Raised Eggs

[Omaha Steve]

Carole Morison of ‘Food, Inc.’ fame is raising money to expand her laying-hen operation.

January 14, 2015 By Willy Blackmore

Willy Blackmore is TakePart’s Food editor.

http://vimeo.com/116458927


http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/01/14/food-inc-chicken-farmer-crowdfunding-campaign?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2015-01-14

As Carole Morison puts it, she’s existed on both extremes of the agriculture industry over her decades-long career as a chicken farmer. For 23 years, she raised broilers as a contract farmer for a big poultry company. That period of her life ended after she invited a film crew to shoot footage inside her barns—images that became a major part of the 2008 documentary Food, Inc.

She lost her contract after the film came out, but that was OK with Morison, who now raises pastured laying hens. In a new video on the ag-crowdfunding website Barnraiser, the reformed farmer says that when her contract was dropped, “we had reached a point where we had had enough. The environmental issues, the animal welfare issues, the public health issues with antibiotics,” had all turned her off to industrial-scale farming. “We had reached a point where we just weren’t happy anymore.”

She’s since converted Bird’s Eye View Farm to a far happier place—for chickens and ranchers alike. The Animal Welfare Approved operation produces 4,200 eggs per week, but Morison can’t keep up with demand. So she’s raising money to add a new barn to house more hens, upgrade her egg-washing and -packing facility, and perhaps most interestingly, create a program to help convert other chicken farms on Maryland’s Eastern Shore into humane egg operations.

Morison may have big plans for expansion, but she seems at peace with the work she’s doing too. “I’m definitely proud of the way that I raise them,” she says of her birds.

ALSO at link: TAKE ACTION PETITION
Secretary Vilsack: Chicken Feces Has No Place on My Plate!

Empowered by: Government Accountability Project
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack is so desperate to deliver the poultry industry its revered Modernization of Poultry Slaughter Rule that he’s allowing the USDA to ignore and misrepresent...Read More
To: Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack

[Liberal_in_LA]

1. kick

[Brickbat]

2. Lots of efforts to do similar things. She should get in touch with this organization:

http://www.locallylaid.com/

In the past two years, we’ve partnered with farmers in Henriette, MN; Kalona, IA and Middlebury, IN. This gets more eggs to market from hens who exercise, seasonally forage and engage in instinctual behaviors year round.

[Fred Sanders]

3. This is interesting, some judges get it, not in the U.S.A., different laws I guess.

http://www.manitobacooperator.ca/2011/08/04/manitoba-pork-says-hog-deaths-were-an-anomaly/

"A highly publicized judge’s rebuke of hog industry transportation practices after an isolated incident in 2008 had pork industry officials on the defensive last week.

The death of 22 pigs from heat stroke on the way to slaughter in 2008 was an anomaly, says Manitoba Pork’s general manager Andrew Dickson."

[Miigwech]

4. Yes

This is great, thanks. I get eggs from my neighbor's farm and they raise their chickens the same way. I'm going to show them this.

[JDPriestly]

5. I have wonderful memories of holding my grandmother's hand and walking up to the old house

that had been converted into a chicken coop. My grandmother picked up the eggs. The chickens scared but fascinated me when I was small.

I also remember going with my grandfather to buy chicks from a hatchery. I don't know how old I was, but I was allowed to name a couple of the chicks. The next year, I returned to the farm and asked about my chicks. My grandparents turned pale and silent.

Such is life on the farm. My grandparents loved animals, but they could not have afforded to keep so many of them if they had not sold the animals to market or butchered and eaten them. It's sad, but I learned that lesson early on.

It's great to see the chickens free and healthy. I love this kind of old-fashioned farming.

[Beringia]

6. great

[Babel_17]

7. Organic Egg Scorecard

http://www.cornucopia.org/organic-egg-scorecard/