I am not sure that you can count a distressed fowl running around like mad worrying about the coming winter scarceness a happy goose. Or at least any more happy than a force-fed one.
Well, there seems to be a real correlation with happy meat and taste quality, so that this farmer was decisively winning international foie gras taste competitions is probably real evidence that his geese were happier. Personally, I'd much rather be running around like mad worrying about the coming winter than being force fed. And in geese, the worry-based gorging is much more natural than the alternative of force feeding.
Foie gras, the delicacy made from the liver of a very fat goose (or sometimes duck), is believed to be unethical and is therefore frequently banned. For a long time, it was believed that the only way to properly fatten a goose is to continually force-feed it through a tube over several weeks, which is probably a highly unpleasant experience, although it's difficult to tell. Recently, Spanish farmer Eduardo Sousa revealed that under highly specific conditions, you can get geese to fatten themselves voluntarily.
Geese will instinctively gorge themselves when winter is coming on. Eat a goose right after it's fattened itself up for the winter, and you get a delicious treat that died happy. The problem is that geese will only do this if they believe food may become scarce during the winter (or their instinct to gorge only kicks in when the environment is such that that would be a reasonable inference; it's not clear whether it's the goose or evolution doing the analysis). If they realize that food will remain available during the winter, they eat normally. And there are quite a few possible clues--farmers trying to replicate Sousa's setup have discovered that cheating on any part leads to unfatted livers.