- Free Range
- No Brine Injection
- No Antibiotics
- No Hormones
- Vegetarian Feed Only
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The term "free range" refers to food from animals that have access to outdoor spaces. It can also refer to animals who have free access to graze or forage for food.
However, although the term "free range" brings to mind wide open spaces with animals living in nature, eating natural foods, and soaking in the sunlight, there are no government regulations in place in the U.S. to ensure this is the case. Therefore, it's important for producers to be clear about what they mean when they say their food is free range.
In addition, while all organically raised food is automatically free range (certified organic standards require this), all food raised free range is not necessarily organic.
Synonyms for free range include free roaming, cage free, and pasture raised.
For chickens to be free range, the birds must be "allowed access to the outside,". In practice, this can mean the chickens live most of their lives outdoors, retreating to their coop only when weather or other factors require them to do so.
Importantly, there are many farmers who do, in fact, give lots of free range to their free-range chickens, whose chickens have real, meaningful access to the outdoors, and are even free to roam (usually within large, moveable enclosures) on real fields and actual pastures, hunting and pecking for extra food along the way. Many farmers even use hay bales or old farm equipment to create environments for the chickens to explore and exhibit natural behavior like roosting and climbing.
Some smaller farms give their chickens real freedom during the day to explore far and wide (chickens naturally want to roost and gather closely at night, so both their natural behavior and their protection from predators are being respected when they're put in a coop at night). These chickens may even gather a significant amount of their food themselves. These farms will often put the label "pastured," which has no legal or regulated meaning, on their chickens to differentiate them from the less-free legal definition of free-range chickens.