Photo by Fred Price Faye Chan with Chinese silky chickens, Fred and Ginger. They have black skin, black bones and an extra toe. (Click for larger image)

One farmer's viewpoint

By FRED PRICE

The reason our eggs are so good is that we feed our birds good stuff. If the flock is small enough, things like kitchen scraps make a significant difference. The chicken, duck and goose areas are next to the garden, which has never seen pesticides or chemicals of any kind. During the growing season all the weeds, with big clumps of dirt attached, are given to the flock.

The ducks like slugs and snails a lot. The geese do not like worms. Chickens love worms. These factors as well as others determine who gets fed what.

We strive for the "natural egg." We cannot be organic since we are unable to find a supplier of organic feed and we do not have enough land to grow our own. So, we buy a feed that has no medication or hormones or any sort of "un-natural" stuff like that. Instead of chicken feed we use a game bird feed and whole corn, whole oats, whole rye, sunflower seeds, nutritional yeast and free choice egg shells and oyster shells. In the winter we give them seaweed. It is recommended that you don't give them egg shells, because that will give the birds a taste for eating eggs. We do a lot of baking and cooking with eggs. We give the shells to the birds. If the shells are hard, the birds will not eat the eggs. If the birds have a diet deficient in calcium and make flimsy eggs, then those eggs will get eaten. Our birds don't eat good eggs.

At this point I offer a revelation: the natural egg is seasonal!!! I can hear you gasping as you read. "How can that be? After all we can purchase pathetic frail eggs with miserable pale yellow yolks all year round!"

Well dear reader, those are not real eggs. Those are imitation food substitutes made by Du Pont, Monsanto or maybe Kodak-or maybe by robot chickens made by General Motors. Those are factory chickens that lead a factory life, full of stress and disease. They have no flavor and no muscle tone, which is why they are so tender. A real chicken, duck or goose has muscles from the very act of walking around. But the robot chicken is given very little nutrition; so to compensate it is given a nice dose of hormones, pesticides and fungicides (from the feed) as well as mysterious substances that have not yet been proven deadly. Those birds live a horrible life in cages.

	Photo by Fred Price Faye Chan with ducks in the forground, chickens in the background. (Click for larger image)

The natural egg is produced by a natural bird, walking around and scratching. They eat what turns them on. Sometimes bugs, sometimes growing green things, sometimes grit, which is important for the digesting of natural foods.

On the darkest and shortest days of the year the birds produce the fewest eggs. As the days get longer, more eggs are produced. This goes on until the days start to shorten again and egg production gets less and less. We think that the birds are resting. We also think that this is good. We let them rest. In fact we insist. NO staying up late, NO card playing, NO television, NO late night dances, etc.

Since the younger birds produce the most eggs, commercial egg producers will butcher the hens as soon as they start to lessen production. But we don't do it that way. Some of our chickens and ducks have lived to be over ten-years-old. The record for a goose is 101 years old! Our geese are 12-years-old, which is as old as our farm. They make very few eggs but even though they are slackers in the egg production department, we feed them. Every day.

This relaxed atmosphere for chickens may result in a better tasting egg. In any event, if we have to pay for feed, and we do, the customer must pay for the eggs.