LARGE | PASTURED EGGS

One of the easiest and most complete foods, eggs are quick to prepare and can be used many different ways. Whether as a main like poached eggs or a garnish like boiled and sliced on a salad, pastured eggs add color and nutrition to any meal.

In general, eggs and their source, laying hens, are probably the most aggressively dishonored and abused food item in America. If you’re familiar with laying hen cages, you know that about 9 chickens are confined to a 2.7 square foot cage for their entire life. Nothing could contrast more with the Polyface pastured egg, where laying hens have room to roam, blue skies to watch, sunrises to enjoy, and green grass to supplement their locally sourced nonGMO ration.

We have models. The first is an Eggmobile. Portable henhouses on wheels, Eggmobiles follow the cow herd in its rotation to fill the role of birds as sanitizers behind herbivores. The chickens scratch through cow pies, eating fly larvae and scratching the fertility into the soil. They also eat newly exposed insects like grasshoppers and crickets, as well as worms.

The Eggmobile chickens are completely free range, wandering as far as 200 yards away from their portable home. We move them daily or every other day, depending on weather and cow movement, to cover as much ground as possible.

The second model is the Millennium Feathernet. And yes, it’s named after the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. It may not be pretty, but it sure is functional. The structure is an A-frame on pipe skids that we pull around a field. Some 150 yards of electrified netting creates a quarter acre paddock to contain the birds for 4 days.

In the winter, for about 100 days, the laying hens come into hoop houses, or tall tunnels, with deep bedding (carbon). The passive solar heat keeps them comfortable through the frigid winter months. We feed them good green hay while they’re inside in order to keep their green material intake as high as possible.

Taste the Difference!

The below study from Mother Earth News compares Polyface Eggs with the USDA standard egg: