On the recent sunny days I’ve noticed that the sun is much stronger again.

The hens are noticing it too. They’re picking up in their laying. Today I’ll finally give you the egg update which has been due for a while.

We’ve finally come up with a plan that will make for a viable organic egg business.

Jesse and Caleb had been telling me for several years that my dream of raising our own hens wasn’t going to work out.

Our landrace idea

I had this plan of developing a “landrace”, a farm breed of our own. These hens would be healthy and resilient, not needing any artificial care. And they would still lay enough eggs to pay for the organic feed, and an actual wage to help keep the farm business going.

To identify the best layers out of all our cross-bred chickens we put special trap nests into the coops several times a year. These nests would catch the hens when they laid eggs, so we could record their leg band number every time they laid an egg. We would separate out the best hens and set eggs for hatching from this special flock. The new chicks would be from only the best genetics. This way I hoped our egg production would get better every year.

However, the hens still always have a long period during fall and winter when they don’t lay much.

Jesse’s commercial hens

A couple years ago Jesse bought some commercial hens which greatly helped with keeping eggs available. These hens are a special cross, usually between four breeds, resulting in hens that lay well all year long. We fed them the same organic feed and moved them daily on fresh pasture all summer and fall.

The downside to these commercial hens is that they are not raised organically their first 4-5 months. They are raised in a commercial chicken barn and don’t receive organic feed. So I really wanted to make my project work, and kept at it for a few more years.

The last straw

This winter, instead of another small improvement, the Bountywoods Farm hens are laying even less, and they haven’t restarted laying as soon as they usually do, as we’ve mentioned before. I got discouraged and thought of quitting with keeping hens altogether. We have been subsidizing them for years, hoping they would eventually pay their way. But we can’t afford to continue it if this is the final plateau.

Besides, our customers have to find eggs from somewhere else during these periods. These eggs are usually from vaccinated organic hens, or from hens that are not even fed organic feed.

We’ve been wracking our brains for a solution for the last several months. And I believe we have a good solution now.

After calling around to different hatcheries again, I found out that our regular hatchery where we get turkey poults and Rustic Ranger chicks will sell us unvaccinated commercial egg layer chicks. I had mistakenly understood that all egg layer chicks are vaccinated.

The solution

We decided to go ahead with raising the commercial hens ourselves. We will buy the un-vaccinated brown egg layer chicks in the spring and raise them ourselves over summer. In late fall they will be laying and will become our main flock.

Since the chicks are not fed until they reach the farm, these hens will be fed organic feed all their lives. And instead of being cooped up in a big barn with thousands of other young pullets for their first 4 months, they will be raised on pasture.

This will be efficient enough to pay for our time spent with it, making it practical to continue raising hens for eggs. We are very happy that we don’t have to quit with eggs, since many of you have told us you depend on us for organic eggs.

For this summer we will still have both Jesse’s eggs and Bountywoods eggs. “Jesse’s eggs” are from a flock of young commercial hens which we bought last year. These are now laying well and will continue to provide many of the eggs over summer. We actually bought these ourselves, but we still call them “Jesse’s eggs” to distinguish them from the Bountywoods raised hens.

So we’ll have plenty of Jesse’s eggs this summer; and at this point limited Bountywoods eggs. I’m sure the Bountywoods hens will pick up soon though, with the longer days.

At the end of this year we’ll switch to only one type of eggs: organically raised, unvaccinated eggs from the amazing brown hybrid hens. I believe our regular customers should be able to get eggs from us all year round now.