"Natural" doesn't necessarily mean *bad*. The eggs I sell, I can only classify as natural, because I don't buy organic feed for my chickens. There just isn't a local source for me, and it's not worth my time to drive 300 miles up to Iowa just to buy chicken feed.
They still run free and tear up my lawn and flower beds and get killed by hawks, foxes, coyotes and weasels. So, they are definitely cage free, until we get sick of the destruction... If they wouldn't dig holes in the lawn to take dust baths in, I wouldn't get upset, but they are getting worse than moles! And I can't keep a flower bed looking nice. As soon as I pull the weeds out of one, along come the chickens and scratch all the mulch all over the place and kill the flowers.
We are seriously discussing building a large pen for them.
But, there are no antibiotics used on the birds, and no pesticides or herbicides used on my land. More than half their diet in the summer is bugs and stuff, so it's very close to organic. But, I can't
call the eggs organic, because my supplemental feed isn't organically grown.
But they are "natural".
And a heck of a lot better than store eggs.
edit: I agree that the natural label IS vague, though, and unless you can ask the producer exactly what they mean by that, it isn't worth much. I saw some "all-natural" chicken for sale the other day, and reading the fine print it said, "NO HORMONES".
Nobody uses hormones on fowl. It's antibiotic use that's important. The label did NOT say antibiotic free, so the all natural label was meaningless.