Polyface Pastured Poultry: Laying Hens

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April 8, 2024

All Polyface chicks begin their idyllic life on Polyface at about 1-2 days old. Our laying hens are custom-hatched from a breed we've developed over the last decade. They contain bloodlines from Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orpingtons, Barred Rocks, and Black Australorops.

After incubation and hatching, the chicks go directly into our "brooder". This brooder houses the chicks and provides a warm, safe, comfortable haven for them until they are big enough to live outside.

After the brooder, they go directly to a grass shelter where they continue growing and are moved every 1-3 days to completely new fresh pasture.

Chickens begin laying at about 5 months of age. At that time, we give them access to cozy nest boxes with plenty of hay and allow them to make their own nests. We do not use industry-standard roll-away nesting boxes. We want to foster the instinct of the hens to lay, protect, and warm their eggs. After all, that's what makes them unique - it's their glory - their chickenness.

We have two types of shelters for these pastured hens. One we call an "egg-mobile". This is a mobile shelter built on house trailer axles and able to move anywhere we choose to put them. This is a land-extensive model. The hens are 100% free-range. Once a day, they get a little...urge...(that mother-hen instinct) that tells them to go back to their nest to lay their egg. They return to the shelter, lay, eat a bite, and they're back off to graze, scratch, run, and bathe. These chickens follow our cows and also act as our pasture sanitation and fly control.

Our other model we call a "Millenium Feathernet". This is a land-intensive model for pastured poultry. These birds are protected and guided by an electric net fence. This fence and the structure are moved several times a week. This model keeps the chickens flocked closer together so that they really focus on ground disturbance. (Remember, things need disturbance to grow.) These hens also act as pasture fertilization.

We still collect all of our eggs by hand every single day. We don't 'grade' our eggs, but we do separate them by size - small (peewee), medium, and large. Because we allow our hens to make their own nests, our eggs are rarely dirty and seldom require real washing. Here you can see one of our team members weighing an egg - she has a carton for medium eggs to her left and a carton for large eggs to her right.

All laying hens' egg production drops off substantially after about two years. Once a laying hen quits laying enough eggs to pay for her food and upkeep, she goes in the stewpot.

"Stewing hens" are our egg-laying hens who have passed their laying days. Because they are too tough to fry or broil, historically they went into stews to be cooked long and slow (hence the name). Crock pots and instant pots today work extremely well. Their attraction is the rich taste and exceptional broth.

Amino acids are complex and take time to develop fully. The reason stewing hens have such a rich taste is through their long life their amino acid chains finish developing and your taste buds understand that full complexity.

Among our team, you'll find several favorite cooking methods for these amazing birds. Joel and his wife Teresa put several at a time in a large roaster pan at about 350 degrees for 4 hours, then pick the meat off. Some of us use crock pots: put the bird into your favorite crockpot, cover it with water, add seasonings, and cook on low for 6-8 hours. For instant pot lovers, we prep the bird in the same way, but cook it on high pressure for about 2 hours, then allow a slow natural pressure release.We then chop the meat into chunks and freeze it in quart containers as precooked chicken, a true convenience food when you need meat salad or casserole quickly on a busy day. We freeze the broth and it is golden rich; truly exceptional. (Learn more in Susan's blog post "More than sustenance".)

Here's a kitchen hack: Keep a bag in your freezer with trimmings from all your veggies! When the bag is full, it's time to make broth. The nutrients in the peels, skins, tops, and odd pieces will power your chicken stock to the next level.

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I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion: "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition. That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit. As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished. This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer. You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test. We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats. They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not. We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets: you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question. But I'd like to explore it a bit further. Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history. The planet is awash in food. Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way. We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle. When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe. Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory. Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory. As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet. Soil is the skin of the earth. When it goes, famine results. The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around. Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore? Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough. The soil trajectory does not look good. But at Polyface, we're building soil. Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them. That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases. The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century. At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years. Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down. What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff. By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it. Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry. This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before. African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas. Why? We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals. Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency. Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease. Nature uses disease to cull the weak. Predators pick off the stragglers. This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point: the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day. Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated. We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children. Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money. It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that. Thank you. Let's heal the land together. Joel

Polyface Pastured Poultry: Laying Hens

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