I don’t think I have included a picture of our free range hens before, so here they are in their scratching bed.
There are many benefits from having fresh eggs available at the end of the garden. Perhaps surprisingly, price isn’t one of them, as this is not a cheap way of getting eggs. I’ll explain.
Hens begin laying eggs at around 18-20 weeks of age. In a commercial environment, hens are only kept for about one year, their peak egg laying period, laying perhaps 300-320 eggs. At this point they are disposed of, which is where ‘rescue hens’ come in. But that’s another post, as I am against this practice. It gives legitimacy to sometimes harsh ‘enriched cage’ commercial egg production methods and spreads often unhealthy, ragged and ‘disturbed’ hens through to an ill-prepared public, who could be buying healthy young birds from professional breeders.
The result of this slick industrialised process is the plentiful supply of cheap eggs. ‘Free Range’ is a positive move, but beware ‘farm fresh’ or similar, it means nothing in welfare terms and may be masking the use of cages.
We buy our hens from specialist breeders we trust. They are mostly more expensive pure breeds, but they are worth the extra cost. Partly because we are supporting their continued breeding, but also because they lay eggs of different colours, dependent on the breed, from white, to chocolate brown, to blue.
They also lay fewer eggs a year, some only 250 or so, as they have not been over-bred like modern hybrids.
We believe in giving our hens a good life. We feed then an organic diet and keep them until their natural death. Our oldest hen died at nearly 10 years old and she was still giving us an egg every month or so.
As I think you can now understand, keeping hens the way we do is not a cheap route to a source of fresh eggs. What it is, is an ethical way of keeping hens. Allowing them to roam naturally in a comfortable flock size and giving them the opportunity to live out their days to old age, without counting their financial return.
The also genuinely taste better than supermarket eggs, as the people who buy our ‘excess’ tell us every week.
And finally, here is what you will very rarely find in a supermarket egg, a double yolk. Once a week or so, something goes slightly wrong with a hen’s egg making process, and it lays an extra large egg, which means a double yolk.
Apart from it being eye watering to lay, the double yolk eggs are always a bonus for us, and another part of making our hens that little bit more special.