Category Archives: Laying Chickens

Eggs from the Cookie Cutter

We’re members of the American Pastured Poultry Producer’s Association, and part of the membership is being able to participate in an online discussion forum. A few days ago the question arose, “Where could a person find eggs that had been candled to ensure no blood spots, for a customer who was a strict vegetarian and couldn’t eat them?”

As it turns out, blood spots have no correlation with fertile or unfertile eggs, meaning that this customer’s concerns about eating an undeveloped embryo were rather unfounded, so I suggested the farmer talk with the consumer to gently educate them about what blood spots in eggs really are. Here was my comment: “I would say, that unless a producer is willing to go to the extra expense of candling all the eggs (and culling all the blood-spot-containing ones!), this would be a great opportunity for customer education. Certainly one of our biggest hurdles as pastured producers is being able to educate our customers so that they can eat “nose to tail,” since we don’t have luxury of high-volume waste commodity sales…. It’s work, but it produces the loyal, high-quality customers we need to thrive.”

You see, when folks spend their lives buying cookie-cutter meat (and yes, even egg!) products from the store, they grow accustomed to every single product looking, tasting, and smelling the same every time. But I’ll let you in on a farm secret… Real food does not come from a cookie-cutter and varies from animal to animal and year to year. Eggs, even from a single chicken, vary in size, shape, color, and texture. But think of how much work and waste goes into selling only “Extra Large Brown Eggs.” USDA grading standards even include a silhouette of the “perfect” egg shape, since some eggs are more round, some are more missile-shaped, and some are lop-sided, and must be culled because they don’t fit the criteria.

Large-scale animal production factories (“CAFOs”) can perfect their products to this minute degree because they have access to a commodity market that most consumers aren’t aware of. The eggs that don’t make the “grade A” cut, like the “peewee” eggs from young hens or the eggs with weird shells or double yolks or other harmless anomalies like blood spots, end up as liquid or powdered egg product. Nothing wrong with that. I suppose it’s good that even commercially-produced foods aren’t wasted… But the point is that this side of real production is hidden from the consumer purely for the sake of visual uniformity. So when you start buying from a real, small-scale farm, you might be a little shocked with you crack open your first double-yolked egg!

So tell me, does it give you the heebie jeebies to discover what real food is like, or do you see it as an adventure?

How long do eggs keep?

Cluck-N-Oink Crew on Pasture

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Pasture Management: The Cluck-N-Oink Crew

Matt has been experimenting with rotational methods that enhance the health of our pastures but that reduce our labor load in moving the critters regularly. We move our chickens and pigs very frequently and decided to try a shared fence set-up during the cool months when wallowing isn’t necessary for the pigs.

The strategy is to use a shared net set-up and only have to set up one new pen for each move. The following groups then use the previously set-up net paddock and reduce the amount of fence moving significantly. It also enables us to move the groups more often because less of our labor is spent moving overall. What we get is a nice, tidy, lightly tilled field ready for spring sunshine to make the seeds in the soil sprout. Chicken manure is especially helpful to jump-start a barren pasture to a-growing.

So far it’s working very well. These groups move together every 2-3 days. This allows minimal parasite build-up, access to fresh pasture constantly, and good manure distribution across the farm. Right now the Cluck-N-Oink crew is fertilizing our north pasture, the one most damaged by overgrazing prior to our arrival. That field was pretty representative of most old cow pastures in East Texas–yielding poor, very slow growth, little ground cover, and hungry cows.

We hope to see a dramatic improvement in grass growth when spring arrives! Pigs and chickens work wonders on pasture to jump-start microbial activity, clean up dead growth, and stir up the seed bed exposing viable forage seed to moisture and sunlight. In a few years we will probably not even be able to see the ground anymore because the sod will thicken and protect it!

Faraway view of the Cluck-N-Oink crew. Two groups of pigs follow one group of chickens in our current set-up.

You can see the contrast in ungrazed ground. The grazed ground gets a nice, even light tillage to stir up the soil and seed bed, aerate the microbes, and get rid of dead overgrowth. No diesel required!

A little nap time, a little play time, and a little eating time.

Coming over to say hello

The Boar. Just woke up from a late afternoon nap.

This momma pig is getting a good ear-scratching on her shade hut.

A skittish Old English Game rooster apparently flew the coop and is looking for a way back in.

A lovely Ameraucauna rooster eyeing the photographer.

A pretty buff Orpington laying in the boxes of the old egg-mobile.

Free-choice access to a yummy soy-free, non-genetically-modified feed.

One of the young Black Sex Link roosters sprucing himself up for the ladies.

Somebody didn’t quite make it into the nest box. Makes an interesting centerpiece while this hen is at work.

Peeking out while at work.

This hen is a young Black Sex Link.

This box even has a window!

Chickens seem to prefer hay over wood chips in their nest boxes.

A pretty little clutch of eggs.

Some girls ready to head back out to pasture after laying the day’s egg. Lady is their guardian and takes excellent care of them.

Slatted floors allow droppings to fall directly onto pasture. Look out below!

The chicken escalator.

Chickens a-scratching on a lovely February afternoon.

New Egg-Mobile: The Egg Ark

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Check out our latest project, constructing a new nest box facility for our youngest batch of layer chickens. It will provide shade, night protection from predators, mobile feed, nesting space, roosting space, and of course will be totally mobile so it can be moved across pasture easily. Regular movement of chickens across pasture encourages healthy growth of grasses and non-toxic incorporation of manure into the ground. Plus it gives the chickens lots of forage space and keeps predators confused! We expect this Egg Mobile, affectionately known as the Land Ark or the Egg Ark or the Chicken Ark (“Chark”) due to its massive size (it’s almost 40 feet long!!), to house around 550 chickens. But you never know until it’s done!

How does a busy momma find time to do construction? Technology helps!

You might not be able to appreciate its monstrosity from this picture, but this thing is HUGE! Hence the name, Egg Ark. The big flap is the lid of the feeder, which closes. We were just testing our clearance.

This gravity-fed feeder will reduce labor and feed waste tremendously. It can hold about a ton of feed and keeps it nice and dry and at beak-level.

Matt chops off some loose ends. These slats are made from repurposed wood spacers we used when we milled lumber that burned in the fires of 2011.

A close-up of the slatted floor. This will allow the manure to drop through to the pasture below with *hopefully* minimal work!

Matt plans the next step for constructing the Egg Ark.

Here's what the chicken mobile AFTER it is built--haha!

Here’s what the chicken mobile will look like AFTER it is built–haha! Lots of eggs, lots of happy chickens!

What happened to my dark-yolked eggs?

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What happened to my dark-yolked eggs?

201309 eggs color

I have seen lots of conversation online about consumers’ local, pasture-based egg source selling them pale eggs in the summertime—even paler than what is found at the supermarket!

Naturally the reaction is, “Why am I paying more and going to greater lengths to get what appears to be an inferior product?”

Good question.

Eggs, like all seasonal foods, change in appearance, quality, and even taste according to environmental factors. Here in east Texas, the animals’ biggest challenges are keeping cool during our long, hot sunny summer days. In fact, our hot, dry summers are almost like northern winters in the sense that the plants and animals go into survival mode and don’t produce as much or as well as they do during the rest of the year.

But back to the question. How do you know that your locally-sourced pasture-raised eggs are better than supermarket or health food store “cage-free,” “organic,” and “free-range?”

Let’s not go too far into what “they” are doing wrong—let’s just talk about what “right things” you should look for when sourcing eggs and the reasons for doing so.

What to look for in an egg source

1. Exposure to sunshine.

Being in the sun allows chickens to naturally produce vitamin D. It also helps their environment to be cleaner because of the sun’s sanitizing ability. Pathogens cannot take hold in a UV-washed environment. Of course, the chickens tend to hunker down in the shade during the hottest part of the day, but they still get plenty of sunshine exposure.

2. Exposure to growing vegetation.

Real vegetation is one of the main sources of the detoxifying agents like chlorophyll and beneficial polyunsaturated oils in pasture-raised eggs, such as CLA and omega-3 fatty acids. Sure, those can be artificially supplemented in conventional chickens’ diets, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Perhaps the natural seasonal change from lush spring green to fibrous summer forage plays a role in producing healthy chickens, eggs, and egg-eaters. It is certainly something to consider!

3. Exposure to real bugs.

Eating insects is where chickens get their vitamin K as well as other hard-to-find nutrients. Plus chickens have fun chasing the bugs and chasing each other when somebody finally catches one. Thank goodness for chickens so we don’t have to eat bugs ourselves just to get vitamin K! Eggs are much tastier than grasshoppers.

Pro tip: “Cage-Free,” “Free-Range,” and “Organic” labels DO NOT indicate that the chickens were actually raised outdoors. It can simply mean that they “have access” to outdoors, which can be a tiny enclosed concrete pen with screen walls. No grass. No bugs. No sunshine. Better to look for “Pasture-Raised.” Better still to visit the actual farm!

4. Avoiding Genetically-Modified Feeds (GMOs).

Genetically-modified organisms come in a variety of forms, but the primary ones you’ll see is soy, corn, cottonseed, rapeseed (aka canola), and alfalfa, and the primary use for these kinds of crops is for livestock feed. If your farmer doesn’t know whether the feed contains GMOs, it PROBABLY DOES. It can be extremely difficult to source non-GMO feed at typical farm supply stores, as livestock feed is one of the top outlets for GMO products.

GMOs haven’t been required to be tested for safety AT ALL, and the few trial feeding experiments that have been done indicate that feeding animals GMOs results in stomach and intestinal problems and development of tumors. Thanks but no thanks.

5. Avoiding soy.

Soy contains lots of nasties, including estrogenic compounds, high levels of phytic acids, and goitrogenic phytochemicals. Soy is cheap and high in protein. Soy also happens to be a plant and so has become extremely popular among chicken feed producers because the necessary protein levels for healthy hens can be attained while still using a “vegetarian-based” feed. Newsflash: chickens aren’t vegetarians. They need bugs! But when you put 80,000 of them under one roof, there aren’t enough bugs to go around. Thus the “need” for high-protein soy.

Chickens do need some supplemental protein, but there are better alternatives that are lower in those bad phytochemicals and are not genetically modified (yet), like field peas, sesame, peanuts, milk, meat, and bugs! There are those bugs again…

6. Avoiding antibiotics.

There are three ways antibiotics might be used in a laying chicken’s life. First it is when the birds are young and it takes the form of “medicated” feed.

The second is similar, when adult chickens are fed “medicated” feed to prevent disease and reduce stress. The problem with long-term use of low-level antibiotics is that evidence suggests this is where your superbug pathogens come from. Bacteria always exist in food and among animals, and when exposed to non-therapeutic antibiotics, they grow resistant and become extremely dangerous. Antibiotic use like this necessitates bigger and badder guns to provide food safety such as chlorine or ammonia washing, pasteurization, and irradiation.

The third use is the occasional, therapeutic use of antibiotics for emergencies. When a chicken is sick and the antibiotics would save her life, ok. At Shady Grove Ranch, we prefer simply to “do the chicken in,” but we rarely have sick birds to begin with.

7. Avoiding arsenic and other growth stimulants.

Arsenic is (surprisingly) widely used among poultry growers to help the birds to grow and remain productive in a stressful environment. It acts as a appetite stimulant and helps the birds to ward off certain confinement-related diseases. In meat chickens, it produces a nice “healthy-looking” pinkish flesh in the chicken. But it’s a poison and we feel it really has no place in food production if there is a better way to produce the food, such as using strategies that allow the animal to naturally detoxify and live in an environment that is appropriate and therefore very low stress.

Pro tip: “All-Natural” labels are basically meaningless and don’t refer to the way the animal was raised. So if your eggs claim to be “all natural,” they may still have come from chickens that were fed antibiotics, GMOs, and arsenic. Yuck!

8. Rotational Management.

Rotational Management is key to good chicken health, good soil health, tasty eggs, and sustainable production. When any animal is left too long living in its manure, it will get sick. Just like humans. Animals should be rotated across pasture so their manure has time to be digested by the soil and rendered safe and useful to the land. In other words, chickens shouldn’t have to live in their own toilet. This should be common sense, but we’ll be the first to tell you that it takes a lot of work and ingenuity to actually put it into practice. Many backyard chicken operations employ the use of permanent pens that ultimately lead to the chickens having health problems. Thankfully the use of “chicken tractors,” or small mobile pens, is on the rise! Why is rotation so hard? Because everything LOVES to eat chicken and lots of protection and planning are required to keep predation under control while still allowing the chickens to forage freely. Chicken tractors are a nice small-scale solution to both problems.

What about “confinement?”

Notice “avoid confinement” isn’t on this list. What does “non-confined” mean, anyway? Whether it’s a tiny cage or a perimeter fence around 100 acres, the chickens have to be confined somehow. This term takes a bit of common sense to interpret, just as with “cage-free,” or “free-range.”

Chickens don’t really need a huge amount of space if they are managed well. If you find a local farmer who keeps his chickens in a small pen, but who is dedicated to moving them frequently, that’s fine! Even farmers that lock their chickens in at night but allow them forage time during the day are doing great. After all, a farmer has to protect his flock from predators and there are lots of ways to do that while still allowing for a healthful, sustainable way to raise them.

The main thing to look for is not whether the chickens live “in a cage,” but rather, whether that cage contains these elements that are important for the birds’ health. Of course at some point even a regularly rotated cage can be so small that it causes the birds undue stress, which will be obvious by the emergence of missing feathers and bodily injury. All the more reason to go SEE where your food comes from!

Does it matter what color the yolks are?

We started this conversation talking about yolk color. There are diverse opinions about what the color of the yolk means regarding nutritional value. But there are plenty of ways to boost the color of an egg yolk, whether naturally or unnaturally. For example, it is known that if a chicken is fed mostly yellow corn, the yolk will be fairly dark. That same chicken on a white-corn diet will have much paler yolks. And chickens who have never even seen real grass may be fed ground marigold petals which lend a beautiful golden hue to the yolk. Maybe the color isn’t as important as some make it out to be…

All we know is that we raise our chickens as healthfully as possible, and here is what happens seasonally with their eggs:

The Seasonality of Eggs

Spring: Eggs are small, whites are dense and very jelly-like, shells are very hard, and yolks are dark, sometimes almost so orange they are red.

Summer: Eggs are larger, whites become more watery, shells get thin, sometimes too thin, and yolks are large and pale and break easily.

Fall: After the rains start, the eggs return to spring-like characteristics.

Winter: When it gets cold enough that the grass stops growing, the eggs return to summer-like characteristics.

This article is already really long, but if you care to consider why this happens, here is our hypothesis:

Spring/Fall

When the grass is growing rapidly and very lush, it is easy for the chickens to eat. The phytochemicals in the grass lend an orange tone to the yolk and the chickens eat much more forage than feed, yielding a smaller, tastier egg. The grass is in its protein stage, so the hen can produce better quality proteins for a denser, more jelly-like egg white. The combination of cool weather (i.e. low stress on the hen’s body) and high mineral content of the grass allows the hen to utilize all the calcium she is eating and make a strong shell. Yes, the yolk is darker and very likely has a different nutritional profile than a summer egg, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the egg is more nutritious. It is just different.

Summer/Winter

When the grasses mature (i.e. go to seed) in hot or very cold weather, the available forage is considerably lower in protein and more difficult to eat and the hen must rely more on her feed ration than on the grasses. In summer, she drinks lots of water to keep cool and the egg white ends up more watery in texture and less dense. The heat makes her body less apt to utilize calcium and her shells get thinner. When it rains, there is a noticeable difference in the shell and yolk quality, but it only lasts for a day or so. Yes, the yolks are lighter in color than spring eggs, and maybe even lighter than store-bought eggs (where the chickens are likely fed a highly controlled diet so the yolk is the same color all year long).

Perhaps it is good to embrace the seasonal changes in our food. Don’t be afraid to ask questions about changes in quality of your farm-raised foods. But don’t be afraid to eat with the seasons, either!

201309 eggs

Chick Training

Laying Chick Training

Check out our photo essay of transitioning our baby laying chicks to pasture from the brooder house. These chicks are about 6 weeks old and love their new home. Here is a photo essay about how we train baby layers to thrive on pasture. These babies are about 6 weeks old and are doing great!

: Since I’m always behind the camera, here’s me (Jerica). Bundled up and ready to load up the chicks!

: Here is the destination. These are the big chickens, the future flock-mates of our little birdies…

: …once they get trained to stay inside of this electric fence. They need a little time to learn not to hop through the holes. (sorry for the blurry picture)

: Here is the “training facility.” It is a portable pen the provides a physical barrier for the chicks with the option to train them to electric fence.

: Here is how you move 250 pounds worth of babies to the pasture.

: They get plenty of air in here while we load them all up.

: Peeping out the sides.

: Ready to go check out their new home.

: Here is Matt’s cheap and effective solution to keeping the panels upright on windy days, which are most days here at the ranch.

: Matt demonstrates how his panels easily unlatch and swivel.

: Entering the paddock.

: Look at all that green grass ready for little beaks to nibble!

: Yum, yum!

: The release! They are excited about the grass!

: Party at the Cadmans’!

: This is their house, enclosed on 3 sides to give them protection from the wind. There are roosts built in so they get used to roosting off the ground, like they will do once they are released into the big chicken flock.

: A few days later, Matt added the electric barrier so the chicks get used to avoiding it. In a few months, these little gals will be laying beautiful brown, white, and green eggs for our customers!

Bird’s Eye View of The Life of a Chicken

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Bird’s Eye View of The Life of a Chicken

Among the misunderstandings that abound concerning industrialized products, probably food production has some of the most. Marketing committees have developed clever ways of giving facts and presenting half-truths so that the pleasant pastoral images evoked when a shopper sees “Farmer Joe’s Free-Range Eggs” on a label that he or she feels comforted to know that the hens that gave those eggs was roaming merrily about a meadow in Farmer Joe’s backyard. Consumers are instinctively concerned about where their food comes from. If they thought it came from the farm equivalent of a torture chamber, they might not buy.

This article will give you a brief glimpse into the different “species” of production chickens from the perspective of the chicken. This is a fiction, of course, but there are lots of facts about food production within. Keep in mind that chickens that produce eggs are entirely different in breed, feed ration, rearing technique, and productive age, from chickens produced for meat. Most folks don’t know this and assume that the juicy, fried chicken they are eating was once a laying hen, if they think about it at all.

You will meet 6 chickens:

Grim Gertrude, the commercial laying hen;
Tricky Tina, the Free-Range or Cage-Free commercial laying hen;
Mediocre Molly, the fixed yard hen;
Lucky Lucy, the pasture-raised laying hen;
Juiced-Up Jerry, the commercial meat chicken;
Frisky Freeman, the pasture-raised meat bird.

Here are their stories.

Grim Gertrude, The Commercial Laying Hen

My name is Gertrude, and I’ve never seen the sun. I live in a big house with 80,000 of my sisters. I live in a cell with a few other gals, but I can’t move around much, so I don’t know how many of us are in here. Besides, it’s dark most of the time, so we just sit around eating and laying eggs every 30 hours or so. When I get bored, I pick off my neighbor’s feathers, or maybe some of my own. I can’t really stand up or stretch my wings, so there’s not much else to do.

When I was a chick, they cut off my beak so I wouldn’t hurt my neighbors. It’s not that I want to hurt them, but being so close and unable to move all the time can make you feel a little crazy. Not having a beak makes it hard to eat, but since all I eat is mash, it’s not too bad. We have access to it all day long, and there is something in the food that makes me crave more.

I never get to sit on my eggs. As soon as they’re hatched, they roll away to a big conveyor. For the first 3 or 4 weeks after I started laying, the eggs were probably sold as powdered egg product because they are small and irregular-shaped. Now that I’m middle-aged, my eggs, as long as they meet size, color, and density criteria, are sold to folks who crack them and cook them. But if I ever have a misfire, like a double-yolk or a soft-shell egg, those are never sold directly to customers. Customers don’t get to see all the variety I can produce.

I’ve never seen a rooster before, but I’ve heard that they make a hen feel secure. We don’t need roosters to make eggs, so the manager doesn’t bother to keep any. It would be a waste of feed, after all. When I was a chick, I was hatched in a big, warm box. For every future (female) laying hen that was hatched, there was a cockerel (young male chicken), too. There is not much use for roosters of a laying variety, though, so they immediately were sent off to the dog food company.

It smells pretty bad in my house, but I don’t have to live in it too long. My lifespan is 5 years or more, but my useful productive life is only about 2, so my sisters and I will probably end up in some canned chicken soup when the time comes. I wouldn’t make it as a meat chicken—my connective tissue is more developed and would require slow-gentle cooking, and my meat is more stringy because I am older. So into the soup can or pet food cookery I go. There is no waste in commercial food production, you know.

Tricky Tina, The Free-Range or Cage-Free Commercial Laying Hen

I’m Tina, and I lay eggs in exchange for food and shelter. I live in a big giant house with 80,000 of my sisters. From what I’ve heard, I have it pretty good, because I have a nest to lay in (though it is shared), and I get to walk over to it. My house is really smelly—I guess you can’t expect the manager to clean it out with all us hens in the way—but I won’t complain because I have heard it could be worse. I think there’s even a door to the outside on our house, but I’ve never been able to find it. Our food and water is in here, though, so I guess I don’t need to go out there. Some of the girls have said it’s just another litter yard with a roof and walls. Doesn’t sound very exciting. Besides, with all the other girls in here, it takes a long time to get anywhere, and I tend to get a little lost unless I just stay in my own little area.

Mediocre Molly, The Fixed-Yard Hen

My name is Molly, and I have an owner named Farmer Joe. Morning and evening, he brings food to me and my 30 sisters. We’re usually pretty hungry by the end of the day because we’ve searched our yard high and low for bugs, grass, and seeds. I vaguely recall a time when there actually was grass in here. But we just love eating green stuff so much that we ate it all pretty fast. I can occasionally grab a strand of grass through the holes in our pen if Farmer Joe hasn’t mowed yet. He sometimes gives us the clippings from mowing—we just love it!

We live a pretty decent life, but it is a little stressful not having space to roam. A lot of my feathers are missing because my sisters pick on me while I’m trying to eat. But they’ll grow back, I suppose. We have a nice cozy little nesting house, but over time it gets to be pretty smelly in there until Farmer Joe cleans it out. I think he uses the litter in the garden. He sometimes gives us scraps from that garden, but we mostly eat food from the local feed store. It hurts our gizzards a little, but we seem to tolerate it. The bag says something about corn and soy.

On Sunday nights, Mrs. Joe lets us out for an hour or so in the evening. We love that time! That’s when we get to find juicy bugs and berries and nuts from the big tree in the backyard. But Farmer Joe worries about the neighborhood dogs, so he pens us back up at night. Mrs. Joe would let us out more often, but she says we’d destroy the garden if we had too much time in it. We just can’t help ourselves.

We lay eggs for the Joes and their friends, and they are fertilized by our rooster. I’ve heard Mrs. Joe talk about how much better our lives are than commercial hens, who are trapped in a big building with no space to roam or scratch. That does sound bad, but only scratching once a week is a little nerve-wracking. I wish we could pick up our yard and move it around!

Lucky Lucy, The Pasture-Raised Laying Hen

I’m Lucy, and I live at Shady Grove Ranch. I have about 150 sisters right now, and we share about 10,000 square feet of pasture. That amount fluctuates, but we always have access to grass and sky. We have a big house that moves along on the pasture with us, which is a great comfort to us when we venture to new territory. It’s nice to have a roof to run under when hawks and owls fly by. We also have a big electric net around us that keeps the coyotes and skunks out.

Every day, one of the Cadmans walks down and gives us fresh food, cleans our waterer out, and collects our eggs. They always laugh when we give an unusual egg. We like to keep them on their toes. Each week, they give us a new pasture by leap-frogging the nets to an adjacent area. Every other day they move our nest house. I guess they keep us on our toes, too.

They give us a really nice feed ration that complements our foraging well. Because our diet is forage-based and we are exposed to the elements, our eggs change with the seasons. When we have a lot of tiny green stuff to eat, the yolks turn very dark. When the weather gets really hot or really cold and the grass slows down, we rely more on the ration, and don’t produce quite as many eggs.

If the weather is wet, our eggs get a little muddy when we hop in and out of our nest boxes. When the weather changes suddenly, many of us skip a day laying. In the summers when it’s really hot, we stop laying for a bit and our feathers molt. Once it cools down again, the feathers grow back and we start laying, but our eggs are little like when we were adolescents. That’s ok, though, because the Cadmans don’t seem to mind.

If we get too hot, the Cadmans turn our mister on. During the heat we eat more salt than usual. It keeps us calm and helps our fluids to stay balanced. When the grasses are dry, we also eat more calcium to keep our shells nice and firm. The Cadmans try to monitor our behavior and consumption to provide real-time responses to our needs.

When one of my sisters catches a bug, we play a game where we all chase her around the pen. Sometimes someone else catches her and gets the bug. Sometimes she gets it. We all take turns.

We have a few roosters to take care of us. Since they don’t lay eggs, they can spend less time eating and more time watching the sky for predators.

Juiced-Up Jerry, The Commercial Meat Chicken

I’m Jerry, and I will be slaughtered at 7 weeks of age or less. My friends and I live in a big giant house with probably 80,000 other young birds. I grow so fast that I have trouble walking, so I spend most of the time laying on my own excrement. That wouldn’t be so bad, but the air quality around me is so terrible that I have irritated mucous membranes, and when the humans come into my house to clear out my brothers who have died from the high-stress environment, they have to wear masks.

We get plenty of food, but it never really satisfies. Something in it irritates our throats so we eat more to soothe them. My flesh is rosy pink because of the chemicals in the feed. I’ll be proud to be such a pretty roast chicken. I take low doses of medication (mixed into the feed) to help get through the stress of fast growth in an unpleasant environment.

Our manure isn’t cleaned out while we live in this house. It builds up, and, once we are gone, is eventually moved to a lagoon or trucked away to local cattle or crop operations. So you can imagine that it gets pretty smelly in here.

When we are harvested, we are packed into crates on an 18-wheeler and hauled to the nearest processing facility. There, we will be mechanically eviscerated. It isn’t a perfect system, so when the cutters miss and our toxic poop goes flying everywhere, the fix is to dunk our carcasses in bleach water. Nevermind that our flesh is abnormally soft because of rapid growth, unnatural diet, and lack of exercise, causing it to absorb up to 5% of this fecal-chlorine solution. That “moisture” will make cooking our breastmeat more pleasant than it would have been had we been raised the natural way.

We appear to feed mankind at a low cost with little manpower involved using land as efficiently as possible. But the truth is that the money and manpower and land usage are spent elsewhere. Food is food, and it must be grown somewhere.

We chickens eat grain that is paid for by tax dollars, and the workers that care for us are the manure handlers and the grain growers and the businessmen that lobby for subsidies and the taxpayers that allow their incomes to pay for business decisions over which they have no control. The land we live on in such dense numbers is taken up in the corn- and soy-producing states, like Iowa and Ohio. In fact, to raise 80,000 chickens, it takes around 280 acres to grow the grain, and that’s assuming only one batch of chickens per year. Of course, to use these fancy houses efficiently, our farmers do more like 6 batches per year, making the ACTUAL average annual land usage of a poultry farm more on the order of 1,690 acres, plus the space it takes to actually have the houses and the processing facilities, etc. This is not to argue that people eat grains instead of chickens. But perhaps there is a better way to grow chickens for meat…

If I make it through the scalder, plucker, and mechanical evisceration stations at the processing unit without damage, I’ll likely be sold whole. I’ll probably end up at the supermarket with an “all natural” label on me, which doesn’t refer to the way I was raised, but rather that my carcass wasn’t injected with artificial flavors. If I have any tears in my skin, I will be parted out to be sold as leg quarters and boneless skinless breastmeat. Everyone loves eating that because it’s so easy to cook. It’s too bad they don’t try eating broth made with my bones, because that is probably the healthiest thing about me, despite my background.

Frisky Freeman, The Pasture-Raised Meat Bird

My name is Freeman, and I live on actual ground at Shady Grove Ranch. My house has about 100 other birds in it and provides us with continual access to grass, dirt, cow pies, and fresh air. We like to scratch around in search of bugs to eat. We also love eating the grass and various forbs in our pen. Tomorrow we’ll get a new patch of grass, just like we did yesterday. That’s always exciting.

We have a guardian dog nearby that scares away the predators. Our farmers, the Cadmans, come to feed us twice a day, and they sometimes take some of us out of these pens so we aren’t too crowded. When it storms, they run out in the middle of the night to prop up our pens so the water can drain. They also put hay around us to keep us warm if it’s windy and rainy.

We all grow at our own paces—at harvest time, some of us will be 5 pounds, but some of us will not make 3 pounds. We have different personalities, you know, so some of us don’t care as much about eating. When harvest time comes, we are placed into crates with enough space that we don’t get overheated. Then we are processed by hand and washed with pure water (no bleach!). We’ll be food for people who cannot eat soy or who want their chicken raised as naturally as possible. Our processors are very careful with us because they know that the Cadmans only sell to customers. If our carcasses get damaged, there is no canned-chicken or chicken-by-product company on standby to purchase rejected meat.

We are a meat breed, so we’re not into flying or frolicking constantly. But we do enjoy chasing bugs (and each other) and flapping our wings and stretching our legs. We live a great life making nutrients that only we can make. And because we get exercise and we grow without the use of antibiotics or arsenic, our flesh is firm and rosy naturally. It won’t be squishy like commercial chicken.

Every year, our farmers try new methods to figure out the best way to raise us. We have to be protected from predators, wind, and rain. Our house also needs great ventilation because it gets really hot in Texas. Our farmers want us to have fresh pasture every day, so our house can’t be too difficult to move. When we eat greens, our fat tends to have more omega-3 fatty acids, and we feel better. They also want us to be exposed to sunlight so our pupils can signal for the production of vitamin D.

We live a good life, despite the fact that we are intended for meat. We get to be chickens instead of machines, eating foods that are appropriate and living in a non-toxic environment. Best of all, we get to nourish people by the hard work we do of producing nutrients that are tasty and easy to digest.

The Price of An Egg

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Lots of folks ask us about why our egg prices are so high. We get lots of different responses when we tell them. Sometimes they are offended. Sometimes they lament over how they cannot afford them. Sometimes they are utterly grateful that someone somewhere close by is raising hens truly on pasture, without using soy or genetically-engineered ingredients.

It doesn’t really hurt our feelings when people don’t want to pay $6 or $7 for a dozen eggs. But it does make us wish that there was a way to bring our price down. If that isn’t possible, we strive instead to make people see that compared to many other foods (particularly Frankenfoods) or the alternative of facing a life of poor nutrition, our eggs are really quite cheap. But we won’t go into that now. The purpose of this particular post is to explain what an egg really costs.

Being in farming, being young, and being fairly outspoken make for a very noticeable combination when Matt and I meet new people. It helps that we are excited about what we have learned about eating traditional foods and how good we feel compared to just a few years ago when we were eating the SAD (Standard American Diet).

One day, a fellow farmer came up to Matt and asked him, “How much do you get for your eggs?” Matt told him. (At that particular time, they were $7/dozen.) His eyes bugged out at Matt’s answer. He couldn’t believe it. He was ANGRY that we charged that much for such a low-value commodity. He asked if we sell them all. Most of the time, we do. (But we only have a small flock of chickens.)

He wanted to know why we charged so much. Matt explained our management and feeding principles: rotational “grazing,” non-genetically modified feed, non-soy feed.

Matt asked the man what he charged for his own eggs. “$3.50. And they’re almost organic! I let them out every night to forage!” Matt, loving a challenge about the definition of that term, asked him, “What do you feed them?” “I buy a layer ration from ___ Feed Supply [a popular local feed store].”

“Do you know what the ingredients are?”

“Yes!”

“What’s the first ingredient?”

“Well, I don’t remember right now…”

“Well, I’ll tell you. The first two ingredients are soy and corn, and they are both genetically-modified.”

The conversation continued, and it was clear that the man was frustrated because he wasn’t making money, but he didn’t know why people wouldn’t buy his eggs if he charged more.

About a week later, Matt visited his booth, and the same man offered to sell Matt his entire chicken operation—birds, equipment, everything. He wanted out of the business. He wasn’t making any money.

During both conversations with the man, Matt tried to convey the fact that the feed which he was buying—a VERY trusted and widely-used brand—a brand that boldly advertises its product in red, white, and blue letters–was in fact giving him a GMO product. But he would not even consider that this American-to-the-core company would do such a devious, underhanded thing.

You see, despite the fact that he was buying the conventional (aka cheap) feed, and despite the fact that he was marketing to a crowd that like the idea of buying from a farmer that raises hens that get outdoor access, he still couldn’t make a go of his products. It’s because he, like many farmers, doesn’t understand that the cost of something is not just the price of the feed. To make it as a farmer, not only do you have to factor in all the costs it takes to get your product to your customers (your fences, your property taxes, your water bill, your tractor wear-and-tear, your egg cartons, your banking fees, your gas to get to market, the feed for your livestock guardian dog, depreciation on every single piece of equipment used for the egg operation, and your pay for your labor), but you also have to educate your customer about why your product is special (if it is) and why it costs what it does.

We try to be transparent about this idea. A worker deserves his wages. And we can guarantee that charging $7/dozen for our top-quality eggs isn’t making us rich! But it can’t be breaking us, either. We know that in 15 years, we’ll need to rebuild our fences. In 5 years, we’ll need to buy a new livestock guardian dog. In two years, we’ll need to replace the shade cloth and the summer mister in the hen house. And every year, we have to buy new hoses and waterers and feeders and egg cartons. Part of our job is to find innovative ways to cut these costs. Trust us, the wheels are ALWAYS turning on this issue!

But, as Matt tried to explain to this other farmer who has a day job and is now having to give up “farming,” we have to charge what our products are worth. We only hope that you will find that when we do not compromise on the values that uphold the God-given laws of nature, that we have contributed to the health of our earth, our economy, and our customers.

Reflections from Matt:

On a side note, I recently read an article published in the “NOW” alumni magazine from my alma mater, LeTourneau University, which was celebrating “50 Years of Women on Campus.” (Being a technical and engineering school, getting females was a BIG deal…)

As a fun comparison in the article, they listed prices of many items in 1961, and then fifty years later, in 2011. In the last 50 years, the price of gold has gone up by a multiple of 39 times, a new house 18.5 times, a postage stamps and gasoline 11 times, bread 13.2 times, eggs and bacon only 5.5 times, and milk…a measly 2.5 times!!!

You may ask yourself, “Why have REAL food (milk, bacon, and eggs) only gone up by 2.5 to 5.5 times, while processed food (bread) and all other “necessities” have gone up 11-40 times?”

Matt Cadman’s answers are:

1. Because our government subsidizes certain commodity crops, most of which are genetically-modified.

2. Because our farmers in America have been convinced that their labor is worthless, that they shouldn’t make any money, and that they are not allowed to produce a quality product. They have succumbed to a form of modern-day slavery. Sadly, American citizens have demanded it by declaring that a dozen eggs (which can feed one person for days) should cost 99¢ and a 20 oz bottle of diet soda (which might give you cancer) costs $1.25!

3. Because the conventional farming industry feeds their animals junk and confine them at concentrated numbers in unnatural environments that cause disease and create the need for continual drug intervention.

4. Convenience is king! Why pay $6/dozen of eggs and build your health, when you can go to the Golden Arches, and have ObamaCare pay for your chemo and dialysis? You WILL pay…now or later. At least if you pay now, you’ll have a good chance of healthy children, enjoyable meals, and quality family time during dinner!

How we do Soy-Free Pasture-Raised Eggs