To produce a healthy egg very little is needed in terms of structural material and machinery because chicken live in within a natural system and in reasonable numbers. Their diet is natural and comes mostly from the site itself, and they are free of hormones and antibiotics.
They are humanely integrated and provided with a natural lifestyle. And while they thrive on site, they happily provide other services to the system: recycle food waste, eat bugs and insects, provide high quality manure, help make compost, help prep soil beds, … and the list can go on.
And now the million dollar question: can we provide a city’s needs of daily eggs in such manner?
Sure we can! All we need to do is establish more gardens in and around the city. So instead of a few poultry companies raising millions of sickly treated chicken concentrated in just a few locations, we spread them around MANY proximate location. People can either source them directly, from farmers markets, or from local shops that collaborate with food hubs and aggregators. Only then will we be able to find inexpensive, healthy and tasty eggs.
I remember my parent’s house in Amman back in the 80’s and early 90’s. We always kept a bunch of chicken. What went wrong! When did we get sucked into the industrial black hole and started to care more for the superficial looks of our front yards than producing our own healthy eggs in the backyard?