QUESTION: If a chicken rancher has 50,000 chickens and he has to pay $40 a hen for new roomier cages to meet a state mandate how much of the cost are consumers going to absorb?ANSWER: All $200,000.Chicken ranchers have until 2015 to comply with a law adopted five years ago by state voters barring the sale of eggs in California unless they are laid by chickens who are kept in cages larger than the conventional cage size of 67 square inches. Just how big those cages have to be has left a lot of chicken farmers scratching their heads. That’s because the 2008 Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act failed to specify an exact size.