And nothing is better than an organic, free-range egg. Just ask Nize Nylen, who has been raising chickens on her 13-acre DeLand farm for six years. She now has about 50 hens, chicks and roosters living in a large free-form compound that includes an open-air shed.

"They are living their own way, the way chickens like to live, not in a box," said Nylen, who learned to farm as a child in her native Brazil. "They eat what chickens like to eat: greens, bugs, soil. I feed them lots of vegetables, old leaves from lettuce I grow and other organic scraps.

"And the soil they live on is very rich -- before I built their pen, it was two feet high with just weeds," she said. "Chickens are really good natural rototillers; they eat and scratch everything, even the rocks, and create a very rich soil."

Source: News-Journalonline.com