Pasture Raising
Our story really begins with healthy, green, organic pastures. This is where our hens live everyday and spend all their time. Every few days our chickens are moved onto fresh patches of native grasses, which keeps them on delicious green stuff and ensures our pastures have ample time to recover. The hens help this along by leaving behind the best organic fertilizer on the planet! We think the health of our pasture is directly reflected in our happy hens and the quality of their delicious, highly nutritious eggs.
In addition to organic grasses, our hens eat a nutrient-dense certified organic feed mix that includes GMO-free corn, vitamins, and probiotics. Every morsel that our girls eat is 100% certified organic. That means no pesticides, herbicides, or other chemicals are ever introduced to our chickens, their eggs, or our pasture. Another result is no harmful runoff in our streams, rivers, and oceans.
All this stands in contrast to factory farms. Unfortunately, the life of the average hen is not very pleasant, as most are squeezed into cages with several other birds, or crowded onto warehouse floors in groups as large as 100,000. Their days are spent fighting for space, breathing unhealthy fecal dust, and never seeing the light of day. Even supposed “free range” hens are in most cases warehoused, with only occasional access to a small outdoor area that most never even see, much less utilize. This affects the physical and psychological state of the bird, as well as the quality of the egg it produces.
We hope to see a move toward pasture raising, which is really a move back in time to more sustainable methods of farming. In fact, many of our customers tell us our eggs remind them of their grandparents’ back yard eggs, the likes of which they haven’t tasted in ages!
The difference of pasture raising is very apparent in the look and taste of the egg, and even in the way it cooks. There can be variation in the size and color of the shell, due to the different breeds we raise, their varying ages, and the amount of sunlight each bird received recently. The inside of the egg is most telling, as the yolks are typically darker and richer in color, though this can vary with the diet and “lifestyle” of each individual bird. The grasses they eat are high in beta carotene and other vitamins, impacting egg flavor as well as increasing the nutrition content significantly. Also, you should notice that the egg white is much thicker, and the raw egg is much more composed when broken into the pan.
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