Spring is a time of action…and eggs!
“A Bit Of Egg-Story”
By Raya Carr
Although it tends to be easy to go to the grocery store and find eggs, finding good eggs is another matter. Our farming practices are shown below, but there's also a story that goes along with raising chickens. My personal view of this starts as a child, learning how to hatch chicks from Gwen, and to tend to the chickens growing into adulthood. Over the years, we’ve found that these practices make chickens healthy & happy while their eggs taste great and become healthy to eat. On top of all of this, these practices have positive environmental impacts including the building of soil fertility while fixing carbon in a safe place (soil protected by perennial pastures).
regenerative, rotational chicken grazing system
holistic, management-intensive, portable chicken fencing & housing
hens (and roosters) forage Certified-Organic prairie pastures in Illinois and they also eat Certified-Organic grains (produced in IL) mixed in small batches on our farm
chickens are fed, watered, moved, and supported by a person walking amongst them (not a machine)
the eggs are also hand-collected, put in cartons, stamped, & labelled
Mostly, there's a lot to love in chickens, with their cheerful voices, gracious egg gifts, and beautiful plumage! But also, they can be really nasty to each other and to humans sometimes. I've always appreciated chickens’ earnestness, which even permeates their putting-on-of-airs. And then, there's the egg "business."
Like many businesses, the egg business has pretty extreme pricing pressure. I am still trying to understand why a single serving of specialty coffee to-go can cost almost as much, if not the same, as an entire dozen of organic eggs, and that the price of the whole carton of eggs is what is often frowned upon. There is a structure to our culture, expectation, & pricing behind this. The producer finds themselves in this mindset, too, submerged in the race to the bottom, to the lowest pricing. But it is something to question and contextualize. Specifically, we ask ourselves, “what type of chicken doing the laying?”
One of the things that makes chickens susceptible to the elements while they are raised outdoors is their level of domestication (domestication for the highest egg production per chicken in that same struggle for the lowest pricing). It’s as if the instincts the chickens need to keep them alive in winter have been selected against. The breeds used widely in egg production—even your farmers’ market producers—are often Isa Brown, Red-Star, Golden Comets, and similar hybrid hens who have a quick and production year or two and then not so great heartiness and life expectancy. These laying chickens are bred more for egg production than the intelligence to navigate the choice between spending the night out on the field, or within their chicken house a few feet away, for instance.
But to raise eggs at any scale with a heritage breed laying chickens (heritage is the alternative to the production breeds of chickens I just mentioned) means selling your eggs for much higher than average dollars per dozen. A quick calculation brings us to at least around $8.50/dozen for heritage hen eggs that can be produced with regenerative, pasture-based, organic methods. But we have not given up! Currently, we are formulating a shift back towards even heartier, heritage hens and trying to figure out creative ways that keep our price where it is while not sacrificing organic, holistic standards to make this possible. Very few egg producers, use heritage hens because of the extra feed cost that these "less efficient" breeds necessitate. Currently, Mint Creek Farm raises many heritage breeds, including our sought after turkeys and hogs, and we are looking to increase this over time. We used to raise heritage chickens more widely, back when we were starting our farm in the 1990s. So we would like to innovate and return to this so as to be able to offer eggs at a similar cost from heritage chickens!