Joy - organic eggs can mean that the chickens are kept in a dark horrible place in small cages fed nothing but organic chicken feed (maybe even not as good as I described above). Organic does not mean pastured and pastured can mean that there is just one small hole that only a few chickens can get out of for a few minutes a day.
It makes all the difference if you know your farmer - even if they just tell you what the conditions are!
Some farmers have these things called chicken tractors. They are basically bottomless coops that they pull behind their tractor from place to place on their land. These actually can be pretty good eggs because if the tractor is moved daily there is a daily supply of new bugs and greens for the chickens to eat. The farmer gets her land cleared of weeds and bugs, tilled by the chickens scratching and fertilized by the chicken poop. It's a win/win situation. But there is nothing really as good as chicken eggs that are from hens allowed complete freedom (and the joy the hen experiences with this) AND supplemented with extremely nutritious foods. Chickens that are given high meat, maggots, extra bugs fed superfoods, fermented raw whey, seaweed etc. I have learned make an egg like no other I've ever tasted. Most chickens are running on empty nutritionally even if allowed to fully forage because they have been engineered to lay more eggs than should ever be possible. A wild chicken would never lay 200 - 300 legs a year! To do such a feat a chicken needs mega nutrition to stay really healthy.
That being said though --- Joy --- the egg is a superior food to just about anything you can find in a regular supermarket - even the inferior eggs they have there.
If you can get a farmer who feeds organic and no soy and who lets their chickens out on good pasture you've hit the jackpot. If you find someone who will then not wash those eggs and not refrigerate those eggs for you - you've won the lottery. If you can raise your own chickens then you are in heaven. I adore my chickens. They add so much to my life not only with the eggs, but with their sweet, delightful little selves. They make me smile and laugh out loud with their antics every day.
As far as roosters go - it's usually the rooster that will stress out some of their hens and sometimes their favorite one or two get extremely stressed. The hens I don't think get more aggressive. I know lots of people that have roosters with their cuddly and gentle pet hens. Roosters will protect the chickens, but without predators we have little use for a rooster. Some roosters can be quite aggressive towards humans and the hens are usually a lot happier without them actually. There's really nothing for a rooster to be protecting or warning about here and it's not like they are going across long distances looking for food like they would be in the wild where a rooster would bring the hens to food sources he finds. I have no need for new chicks so his sperm isn't needed for that. Unfertilized eggs stay fresh longer. The only thing a rooster would do is maybe make the whites perhaps better to eat - but I hate the taste of raw egg whites anyway. I dehydrate the whites and feed them to the bugs which I then feed to the hens. I also feed the hens back their eggshells. I try to get back into the hens as much of the nutrition that I take from them when eating those yummy yolks as I can. It's truly amazing to me how much extreme nutrient dense food hens will eat if given to them and how much they seem to need it. My twelve hens would gladly eating a few pounds of slankers pet food a day if I could afford to feed that to them. They will steal it from the cats or dogs and attack them to get at it. The bugs I raise are second place in the running - and those are free so they get lots of those. The other nutrient dense foods like superfood greens, whey, seaweeds etc. are third and sprouted seeds are last on the list and their least favorite food -- it's their backup food -- yet hens in captivity eat probably 80% seeds - and unsprouted at that.