Eggs are a big deal at Black Frog Farm. In fact, I call my husband the “Egg Nazi.” He is [overly] serious about keeping track of how many eggs, what size, what colors, and overall egg production. When ordering chicks it’s a stipulation of Nick’s that the chickens produce LARGE BROWN EGGS!!
(emphasis is his!) I personally like the rainbow effect of having several breeds of chickens that lay multi colored eggs. So I offer him a “Yes, Hon” and go about ordering the chicks that I want anyhow. Egg Nazi tendencies aside, the eggs are a staple here on the farm. We sell a lot of them, and use them for baking and eating, and even exchanging with others for their produce.
So what’s it take to get eggs from chickens? Should be simple, right? Surprisingly, chickens can be picky layers. They don’t like to lay eggs when it’s too hot, too cold, too dark out, too humid….well, you get the point.
Chickens lay the best when they are young, say six months to about two years. They also lay the best in the daylight heavy times of the year, so late spring, summer and early fall. We supplement light for our chickens in their coop by hanging Christmas lights on timers. When the light starts to fade at the end of the summer, I usually put the timer on so the lights come on early morning for a few hours, and again on during late afternoon and go off late evening. This is enough to keep the girls laying close to normal level. In winter, not only does the overall darkness make egg production slow down, but the cold sometimes freezes any eggs we get before we can even pick them. This is when it becomes handy to have a lot of chickens, because we can still get several dozen eggs a week when production is at it’s lowest….if we can get to the coop fast enough before the eggs freeze.
What do we feed them?
Another consideration of how our eggs taste is what the chickens are fed, and how the girls are kept contained. We feed standard layer feed year round, which has calcium added in to help keep the egg shells hard. Our girls get access to grit as well. Grit is just a fancy word for gravel. You can buy grit at a farm store, or just give them an opportunity to find it naturally in the soil. We also give our chickens kitchen scraps, pulled weeds, sunflower seeds, any fruits in the yard that we aren’t going to use (they REALLY like elderberries!!) and a lot of their diet comes from free ranging. Basically it’s a chicken buffet of what’s in season. Our chickens have large enough coops for them fit comfortably in at night, and large runs that they can scratch the ground and run around for exercise when we choose to keep them contained.
We are big believers in free ranging our chickens. Free ranging means that they get the opportunity to get out of their coop and into a fenced in 1/2 acre to eat grass, bugs, weeds…pretty much anything they want. The more pasture the chickens get, the darker their egg yolks = healthier and yummier eggs. They also eat less commercial feed while free ranging, thus saving us money on feed and time to feed them.
You’ll see eggs at the stores labeled as “cage free” and that isn’t the same as free range or “pastured.” Cage free just means that the chickens are kept in a coop without being individually caged. They eat only what the farm provides for them. The largest chicken farms do either cage free or caged. Caged is just how it sounds- chickens are kept in individual cages called battery cages, and fed and watered certain amounts only. The cages are just enough to fit the bird. Their eggs are collected daily for commercial use. I don’t think I need to explain what it means for the bird to live like that, and the eggs don’t have the same flavor or color as pastured birds. If you’re buying eggs from the store and they are not labeled as pastured, this is what you are getting. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have products from animals that are well treated and happy. This is just my humble opinion.
So what’s the rooster for?
Can you keep chickens without a rooster? YES! I have friends who live in the city and can only keep hens. Roosters gotta go according to the city ordinance. That always makes me laugh because hens can be just as noisy and annoying as a rooster. Ever hear a hen cackling after she lays an egg in pride? If not , I’ll try to video it sometime. Talk about mouthy….er I mean beaky! But, I digress. City hens will live happily and lay just as many eggs without a rooster around.
We keep roosters on our farm for a few reasons. First of all, well-sometimes you just get a rooster in the mix! We order chicks from hatcheries usually every other year. I like to order sexed females, so I know that I’m adding to my egg production. Sometimes we get a surprise and get a male in there too. Oops! This just happened to us with the batch we got in spring. Yep- there is a dude in the mix. He just started learning to crow…sigh.
The opposite of sexed chickens is a “straight run.” That means that you get whatever is hatched of that breed with no regard to males vs. females. More talented people than I can probably tell what’s a rooster and what’s a hen early on. I usually wait for a few months and find out who starts crowing 🙂
We get males more often if we hatch out our own chicks on our farm, which is essentially a straight run. While it’s cheaper to hatch our own chicks, we have to deal with the roosters that come with using that method. Sometimes we use them to replace older guys, sometimes we sell them, and sometimes we give them a good life for as long as possible and they end up in soup. I usually like to sell them, especially if they are a nice looking bird. I’ve sold several roosters to kids doing 4-H and wanting to show them in the fairs. While I’m not opposed to eating our birds, I do feel an obligation to give them the best life I can.
We do like to keep some roosters around. The obvious reason for this is fertilization, so we can hatch out our own chicks. Sometimes you get a “dud” guy though, and those dudes meet the selling or soup ending. We also use them for protection for the hens. Roosters are surprisingly protective of their hens, and even sometimes tender with them. They will roam the yard keeping an eye out for predators, and if they see anything that worries them they let out a loud alarm that sends the hens running for shelter. This has been particularly helpful in protecting our hens from hawks. We have a lot of trees the girls can take cover under, but the rooster is the one telling them when to do it. We have even had a rooster give his life for his hens when we had a fox invasion several years ago. RIP Little Man. He was a good guy.
Roosters will alert any hens nearby when he finds something particularly tasty in the yard and wants to share it with his girls. Many times I’ve seen our rooster cluck loudly and his hens come running for a worm or grasshopper or some such tasty thing.
There certainly can be issues with keeping roosters on your farm. We have to make sure that each rooster we keep has a group of hens he can call his own. Too many roosters always equals fighting among them. While roosters can be gentle with their hens, it’s no holds barred between each other. Fights can be vicious and bloody, even to the death. It’s important to manage this by using different coops and preventing interaction, and also by not having too many males.
I’ve had people ask me about roosters who have turned nasty and come after people. Yes, we’ve dealt with that. Those guys meet their maker quickly. Any rooster that shows any aggression towards humans gets no second chance here. It’s just not worth the risk. Thankfully, that isn’t a common problem. We currently have Dave and Bob as our full sized roosters and they are kept separate from each other with their own set of hens. They are both nice guys to their hens and humans. We also have two bantam roosters, Chick Norris and Hercules, and they tend to run between the coops hoping one of the girls will notice their rooster sexiness. They don’t seem to cause any issue, so I leave them be.
Eggs are such a good selling item here at BFF that we are expanding our egg operation to include duck and hopefully turkey eggs. We also have a pair of geese whose eggs are huge and delicious! Geese are seasonal layers, so we only get the nice big goose eggs in the spring and early summer. With geese there is the added hazard of having to retrieve the eggs from a high security protective male goose!
Hopefully next spring I’ll be able to add pictures and stories of several different kinds of eggs we will be offering.
What do you think of the free range eggs?