Free Range

Free range is a term which denotes a method of farming husbandry where the animals can roam freely for food, rather than being confined in an enclosure. On many farms, the outdoors ranging area is fenced, thereby technically making this an enclosure, however, free range systems usually offer the opportunity for extensive locomotion and sunlight prevented by indoor housing systems. Free range may apply to meat, eggs, tax, or dairy farming.

The term is used in two senses that do not overlap completely: as a farmer-centric description of husbandry methods, and as a consumer-centric description of them. Farmers practice free range to achieve free-range or humane certification, to reduce feed costs, to produce a higher-quality product, and as a method of raising multiple crops on the same land. There is a diet where the practitioner only eats meat from free-range sources called ethical omnivorism, which is a type of semivegetarian.

In ranching, free-range livestock are permitted to roam without being fenced in, as opposed to fenced-in pastures. In many of the agriculture-based economies, free-range livestock are quite common.

Read more about Free Range:  History, United States, European Union

Famous quotes containing the words free and/or range:

    It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Narrowed-down by her early editors and anthologists, reduced to quaintness or spinsterish oddity by many of her commentators, sentimentalized, fallen-in-love with like some gnomic Garbo, still unread in the breadth and depth of her full range of work, she was, and is, a wonder to me when I try to imagine myself into that mind.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)