Farm Fresh Eggs

After reading "The End of Food", right after finishing "The Omnivore's Dilemma", I was determined to find a supplier of local, fresh, "happy" eggs. I wanted eggs laid by cheerful, free-ranging, grub-eating, grass-scratching chickens. If you haven't read either of these books, let me just say that I no longer consider "organic" to be a reassuring term when it comes to eggs purchased at a major supermarket chain.
So I checked out the "Eat Local" blog put out by my municipality and came across Fenwood Farms. They have fresh farm eggs. They sell meat that they've raised, or that their neighbours have raised. Much of it is organic. They grow their own feed, a family member runs the abbatoir where the meat is butchured, and they sell their 'produce' in a family-run store out back of their house. They are what city folks would consider very "LOCAL".
Only having just found them, and it being winter, I haven't seen their happy cows grazing in their fields, nor have I seen free-ranging pigs rummaging through last years corn stalks. But I did get a lesson in "free range chicken" politics.
It seems that here in Ontario, chickens can no longer be let outside, free to wander in the field or garden or where ever they like to roam as they seek out bugs and grubs and grain. Due to the threat of Avian Flu, chickens cannot be 'free ranging' anymore. Apparently, if they are to venture outside of their barn, they must be enclosed by double walls of wire, with a roof enclosing those walls so that in fact they are contained in some kind of see-through barn. I suspect that few farmers would have the cash available to build such a specialized 'cage' for their layers... and how many eggs would one have to sell to pay for such a structure??
I will admit that I haven't done any research to date in an effort to confirm or deny the new law. But since that information came from a chicken farmer who sells "farm fresh eggs", I'm pretty sure it must be fairly accurate.
It seems that I'm not going to get eggs that come from free-ranging chickens. But the chicken-raising farmer was so proud, so excited about her flock (and also about her flock of turkeys!) that I could not help but believe that, during the winter anyway, her chickens are living a happy existance in the comfort of their warm barn without fear of predator, storm or starvation.
And when I got home and we tried the eggs I could honestly say that they were the best eggs I ever remember eating. Happy eggs.