Conscious Choices

How many eggs do you eat in a year? Fifty? A hundred? The average American consumes 254 eggs every year—that adds up to about 76 billion eggs produced in this country every year.

To find out where, exactly, all those USDA-approved eggs come from, Lisa Ling visited two very different farms with egg distributor John Baker. Their first stop is Ivan Martin's cage-free organic egg farm. When Lisa and John arrive in the early afternoon, Ivan lets his 990 chickens out to roam the farm freely, which they do every day.

After a day spent dust-bathing, flying, perching on fence posts and eating the feed distributed by Ivan, the chickens head back inside when the sun goes down. "Then they go in themselves," Ivan says.

While they're out, Ivan collects the day's eggs—about 900 on the day Lisa visits.