Jennifer Chaussee has a piece at Wired on hen housing. She attempts to answer some questions that I get frequently asked: why isn't the egg industry converting faster to cage free? Isn't that the trend? Why aren't we all cage free yet?
She writes
“As it turns out, going cage-free requires much more planning, money, and logistical engineering than the seemingly simple notion of setting some hens free would suggest. Ironically, this massive supply chain overhaul stems from consumer demand to return to the egg-producing practices of our pre-industrial past, but without undoing all the positive benefits of scale, affordability, and safety that were achieved through industrialization. It actually took farmers a really long time to figure out how to put the bird in the cage—and it’s going to take a while to figure out how to get it back out.”
Overall, it's a pretty good piece, and recounts many of the issues we've written about in other places.