Our Eggs…

We started by wanting fresh eggs for ourselves every morning. We bought an incubator and ordered a couple dozen eggs of various heritage breed birds. We were amazed by the sheer number of different breeds of chickens there were! Not able to just pick one, we hatched out some Buff Orpington, Swedish Sunflower, Blue Bresse, Icelandic, Sussex, Wyandotte, and Silverud’s Blue Isbar chicks. And, oh, what beautiful chickens we had - an array of colours and sizes and once they started laying for us, all different shades of egg colour. It is truly enjoyable to watch our flock of beautiful birds trotting around our yard, enjoying the sunshine, grass and bugs.

In the summer of 2023, we switched over our broilers to “chicken tractors” - open bottom mobile coops that we move every day. We found with this new system the broilers wasted a lot of grain, as they didn’t get an opportunity, once moved, to go back and clean up the grain they had spilt out of their feeders - so, we decided to bring our laying hens to roam around behind our broilers and clean up all the grain so it didn’t go to waste. We built an “egg mobile”, inspired by Joel Salatin, by re-purposing one of the farm’s leaf cutter bee shelters on wheels, and we parked it behind our broiler shelters. Every morning, an automatic door opens with the sun and the chickens have access to outside, free to roam around eagerly cleaning up spilt grain and all the bugs and grass they want. The door remains open all day so they can return to lay their eggs, and at night, once they are all roosted inside, the automatic door closes with the setting sun. Truly free-range eggs - these layers are not fenced in in any way. All we had to do was swing by and pick up eggs daily after our chores with the broilers were finished.

At the end of the broiler season, once the chickens were all tucked up in their shelter for the night, we hitched up the egg mobile to our truck and towed them back into the yard where we could again, delight in watching them forage around our yard. As the days progress to getting colder, we opened up our insulated barn for them to sleep in at night if they chose, and once they had all decided it was a nicer place to sleep and lay their eggs, we shut down the egg mobile for the season. We continue to open the door every morning for them on nice days so they have to choice to wander outside in the snow. Once it gets down to about -10C, they don’t venture outside. We do keep the door closed on days when it is below -10C, as to keep their space warm and cozy for them.

We’ve now expanded our broiler operation to around 900 birds and subsequently have obtained some more laying hens so now can offer a limited supply of eggs each month. We’ve built an additional egg mobile and likely will build one more for the summer of 2025.