Cage Free Vs. Pastured Eggs

[Such_Saturation]

:P

What's the incentive for a small quality producer to avoid grains and pufas? If I had never heard of Peat and were raising a few hens in my garden, I might think: oh, there's grass, but hey to make sure they're happy and well fed I'll add some grains and stuff.

Because of the popularity of Paleo diets, I think there is a large market for a true grain-free chicken / egg. But what would it actually cost to create?

You could easily do a Kickstarter if you know the right places to advertise. Just a few thousand bucks to start selling and 15-20$ per dozen is not impossible given the average Paleo's wallet to brain ratio.

:P

deep down we all would pay that for PUFA free eggs.

 

[LucyL]

What's the incentive for a small quality producer to avoid grains and pufas? If I had never heard of Peat and were raising a few hens in my garden, I might think: oh, there's grass, but hey to make sure they're happy and well fed I'll add some grains and stuff.

There is a product called cocofeed that is based on coconut pulp and "other natural ingredients". I don't know what those other ingredients are, but I think it would be difficult to avoid all grains for chickens. Even wild prairie chickens eat seeds. Their diet is mostly insects and seeds, fruits and the occasional mouse. Insects can make up half of the wild chickens' diet.

 

[Kray]

What's the incentive for a small quality producer to avoid grains and pufas? If I had never heard of Peat and were raising a few hens in my garden, I might think: oh, there's grass, but hey to make sure they're happy and well fed I'll add some grains and stuff.

There is a product called cocofeed that is based on coconut pulp and "other natural ingredients". I don't know what those other ingredients are, but I think it would be difficult to avoid all grains for chickens. Even wild prairie chickens eat seeds. Their diet is mostly insects and seeds, fruits and the occasional mouse. Insects can make up half of the wild chickens' diet.

Good points, Lucy. In this case, I have to say the chicken came before the egg. Maybe more important about diet when we're eating the bird and not the egg. We could wring our hands about what the cows ate whose milk we're drinking, but in the end, we're relying on labels. We can do our best up to a certain point with what we buy and how much we're willing to spend, or raise our own chickens and milk our own cows. Most of us aren't going to do that.

 

[jyb]

I was looking up the diet of hens for various prenium UK egg brands. The yolk from the eggs of Clarence Court (free-range, no "organic" label though) are a lot darker than usual, sadly it seems that its because they feed them corn.

Our distinctive hen breeds eggs have larger yolks with firmer egg whites and stronger shells. As they are closer to their natural ancestors they lay only 180 eggs a year compared to 280 eggs per year for the average free range hen!

"Our hens are fed on the finest natural vegetarian diet with a generous helping of sun-drenched corn which gives a deeper more colourful yolk.

 

[Jenn]

There are all sorts of ways to manipulate egg color. grasshoppers make the yolk almost reddish. We don't grain our chickens. It's totally possible, if you are willing to have eggs only seasonally and have a climate that allows for year round ranging. Deep snow means you have to have some kind of storable feed. Here's the thing, if you have free range chickens, you have to find the eggs. If you confine them so you get all the eggs, you have to bring the food to them. It's a trade off and not a high enough profit margin to do commercially. We do it for ourselves but not for others.

 

[Spokey]

I like the Clarence Court eggs a lot.

I've been thinking about how you'd find free range chicken eggs and I came up with putting GPS devices on them (shaped like small ornately jeweled crowns, so the chickens wouldn't mind wearing them obviously), and tracking their movement over the day. In all seriousness it most likely wouldn't be hard to analyse the data for probable egg locations.

Oh and GM chickens with glow in the dark eggs, so they're easy to find when the sun goes down. Normally I'm against GMOs but I liked this idea more. And this way they could still have little crowns.

I should probably stop drinking at lunch.

 

[schultz]

I have low PUFA, grain free eggs. I've never had them analyzed but based on the studies I've read they are more than likely under 0.4g per egg, which is what I count them as, but may be even lower. Obviously this wouldn't be a set number but would vary from egg to egg. It's as low as anyone is going to get without spending lots of money on feed.

I feed them boiled potatoes, beef liver and sugar. I supplement them with nutritional yeast, vitamin d,vitamin e, vitamin a, vitamin k, calcium carbonate, baking soda and table salt. Each hen gets less than 0.3g PUFA per day. I live in Canada so they are confined all winter but in the summer they are free to walk around my property, which means they may be getting more PUFA in the summer. I feed them before I let them out in the morning so they probably don't eat enough grass and bugs to make much difference in PUFA. Plus, I think grass and bugs are low in fat.

I believe carotene is what changes the color of the yolk from pale to dark. My yolks are pale (vitamin a is colourless) but each of my hens get 10,000IU vitamin a per day, and each egg likely has from 800-2000IU's of vitamin a.

This feeding regime could be cheaply done by larger scale egg producers but the public would likely be put off by the idea of them feeding beef liver to their chickens.

The main reason I did all this was so that my daughter who is now 10 months old can eat an egg a day.

Anyone else from Ontario?

 

[Jennifer]

I like the Clarence Court eggs a lot.

I've been thinking about how you'd find free range chicken eggs and I came up with putting GPS devices on them (shaped like small ornately jeweled crowns, so the chickens wouldn't mind wearing them obviously), and tracking their movement over the day. In all seriousness it most likely wouldn't be hard to analyse the data for probable egg locations.

Oh and GM chickens with glow in the dark eggs, so they're easy to find when the sun goes down. Normally I'm against GMOs but I liked this idea more. And this way they could still have little crowns.

I should probably stop drinking at lunch.

LOL Well, that's forward thinking, Spokey. I love that you accounted for the chicken's great fashion sense. Nobody wants an egg from a classless hen. And to think, the farmer I get my eggs from wastes his time training his Border Collies to retrieve the eggs for him. Pfff...he so needs to get with the times.

 

[pboy]

I think the bright color is potentially carotene, but also lutein and zeaxanthin which are yellow/orange. They pretty much have to (like cows) be eating a lot of vegetation for this to happen, green vegetation

 

[Jenn]

I have low PUFA, grain free eggs. I've never had them analyzed but based on the studies I've read they are more than likely under 0.4g per egg, which is what I count them as, but may be even lower. Obviously this wouldn't be a set number but would vary from egg to egg. It's as low as anyone is going to get without spending lots of money on feed.

I feed them boiled potatoes, beef liver and sugar. I supplement them with nutritional yeast, vitamin d,vitamin e, vitamin a, vitamin k, calcium carbonate, baking soda and table salt. Each hen gets less than 0.3g PUFA per day. I live in Canada so they are confined all winter but in the summer they are free to walk around my property, which means they may be getting more PUFA in the summer. I feed them before I let them out in the morning so they probably don't eat enough grass and bugs to make much difference in PUFA. Plus, I think grass and bugs are low in fat.

I believe carotene is what changes the color of the yolk from pale to dark. My yolks are pale (vitamin a is colourless) but each of my hens get 10,000IU vitamin a per day, and each egg likely has from 800-2000IU's of vitamin a.

This feeding regime could be cheaply done by larger scale egg producers but the public would likely be put off by the idea of them feeding beef liver to their chickens.

The main reason I did all this was so that my daughter who is now 10 months old can eat an egg a day.

Anyone else from Ontario?

You could probably save yourself a lot of money and just feed the boiled potatoes. They are a complete food in and of themselves. Chickens loose 75% of what the eat in nutrients in their manure, so that's some pricy manure you've got going there.

 

[loess]

schultz, that's awesome, I'd sure like to come over to your place for dinner and an egg or two. So the chickens take to the beef liver pretty well? I'm actually nowhere near Ontario but did visited a friend apprenticing on an organic farm powered by draft horses, just south of London, ON a few months ago. I'm currently in California seeking out educational/working farm opportunities in small scale dairy/animal husbandry and have been daydreaming about what I'd feed chickens if I had them, and just the other day was wondering how liver would work out.

 

[schultz]

You could probably save yourself a lot of money and just feed the boiled potatoes. They are a complete food in and of themselves. Chickens loose 75% of what the eat in nutrients in their manure, so that's some pricy manure you've got going there.

Liver is surprisingly cheap. It's cheaper than almost any other protein. However, there is no sense in wasting money and maybe I should try either reducing the liver or getting rid of it all-together and see if they keep laying as much. Originally when I was formulating a feed I was reading a lot of research on the subject but what I now understand is maybe the numbers for protein per bird are based on low quality proteins from legumes and grain and therefore that same number in a high quality protein would be much lower. It's like 16g of protein per chicken per day or something that they say but maybe it's much less with the potatoes given the quality? One thing I wanted in my eggs was a high vitamin A, and the liver gives that, but I suppose I also give them vitamin A so that's not really a good reason.

Interestingly, I found an article from some farm or agricultural magazine from the 1850's or so and the guy was talking about getting his hens to lay through the winter by feeding them potatoes and beef liver. Not sure how much grain they had access to back then but it was pretty interesting none-the-less. I'll see if I can find the article again.

schultz, that's awesome, I'd sure like to come over to your place for dinner and an egg or two. So the chickens take to the beef liver pretty well? I'm actually nowhere near Ontario but did visited a friend apprenticing on an organic farm powered by draft horses, just south of London, ON a few months ago. I'm currently in California seeking out educational/working farm opportunities in small scale dairy/animal husbandry and have been daydreaming about what I'd feed chickens if I had them, and just the other day was wondering how liver would work out.

Chickens go crazy for liver. Liver, cheese and grapes are what my chickens like the most anyway.

I think the bright color is potentially carotene, but also lutein and zeaxanthin which are yellow/orange. They pretty much have to (like cows) be eating a lot of vegetation for this to happen, green vegetation

Yah I looked it up and you're right. I think maybe I was thinking carotenoids instead of carotene. I guess carotenoid is the whole famile of pigments, beta-carotene being one of them?

 

[Jennifer]

Interestingly, I found an article from some farm or agricultural magazine from the 1850's or so and the guy was talking about getting his hens to lay through the winter by feeding them potatoes and beef liver. Not sure how much grain they had access to back then but it was pretty interesting none-the-less. I'll see if I can find the article again.

I'm not sure if this will be helpful, schultz, but when I was doing RBTI, I had joined a high Brix gardening group on Yahoo and one of the members, Myron, owns a farm and has a blog. I checked it out one day and remember coming across his post (quote and link below) on how he leaves at least part of the south side of the chicken shelter open all winter keeping the chicken very healthy and producing more eggs. Myron and his family practice farming the VERY old school way...they farm/live through biblical teachings, but I noticed that they also try more current ideas as well. They also apply the teachings of Carey Reams (master of high Brix based agriculture who developed RBTI) so you'll notice him referenced throughout his blog too.

"I went to the Library of Congress on several occasions and researched in old books about how to raise free range chickens. One of the things that I found in an old book was that the author had observed that chickens do best in the winter if at least part of the south side of the chicken shelter is left open all winter. He stated that chickens need plenty of fresh air and that totally closing the building to keep them warm was more detrimental to their health than the cold. I decided to try it and found that he was right. For the last eight winters, except for one year, we have left the south end of the chicken shelter open day and night all winter. I have been amazed how healthy the chickens have been through the winter months. On average, we have had few chickens die during the winter. When we have young hens that have started laying in the fall months we have had flocks that have laid 80 to 90% all winter without using artificial lighting (80-90% is the number of eggs per day that are laid per 100 hens)."

http://www.jehovahjirehfarm.com/article ... -cant-see/

Also, do you have access to raw milk and if so, tried feeding your hens it? Myron thinks it's one of the best protein sources for laying hens.

http://www.jehovahjirehfarm.com/article ... -raw-milk/

 

[SQu]

So is a pale yolk healthier do you think? I always thought the opposite but I'd be interested to know. At small hotels and restaurants in some African countries they 're almost colourless. My guess is they're not industrially produced. They may not even be getting what mine get which is a mix of corn, millet, sunflower seeds but thankfully no soy. Scraps, porridge and bugs would be my guess.

 

[pboy]

i think i posted earlier, but if not, the yellow/orange is mostly from lutein and zeaxanthine...not as much beta carotene. This is why the animals must eat greens, fresh greens, to produce yellow and deep yolks, butter fat. If they are allowed to eat grass and natural shrubs this will automatically happen. It probably is healthier, as lutein is an essential nutrient and powerful eye/retina protector
the more i research it, im surprised it doesn't have an RDA and is talked about more...its a non synthesizable important nutrient, that is in human breast milk. Doesn't that qualify it as something pretty important? dunno, but yellow is good...it at least indicates the animal was eating fresh greens, you get an essential nutrient, and if its eating greens its probably got a lot of other good nutrients in there too

 

[jyb]

i think i posted earlier, but if not, the yellow/orange is mostly from lutein and zeaxanthine...not as much beta carotene. This is why the animals must eat greens, fresh greens, to produce yellow and deep yolks, butter fat. If they are allowed to eat grass and natural shrubs this will automatically happen. It probably is healthier, as lutein is an essential nutrient and powerful eye/retina protector
the more i research it, im surprised it doesn't have an RDA and is talked about more...its a non synthesizable important nutrient, that is in human breast milk. Doesn't that qualify it as something pretty important? dunno, but yellow is good...it at least indicates the animal was eating fresh greens, you get an essential nutrient, and if its eating greens its probably got a lot of other good nutrients in there too

That contradict my previous post, citing a producer boasting its colorful yolks were due to corn.

 

[pboy]

legit call...corn though happens to be one of the only non fresh greens food that has lutein, so I suppose there are exceptions...good call, better to know for sure the full extent of the animals diet. Either way though, the fact is has lutein is a bonus

 

[Daimyo]

I found this article about color of commercial "free range" chickens:
http://www.theranger.co.uk/News/The-cri ... r_443.html

 

[Aymen]

"A hen’s diet impacts the color of the yolk in her eggs. If she’s eating plants that have yellow-orange pigments, then the yolk can take on a more orange color. If her feed is composed of corn or wheat, the color of the yolk could be a more pale color," Taub-Dix told TODAY Food."
SO :
Orange > Yellow > Bright Yellow .

 

[TeaRex14]

Truth is all marketing labels for eggs are sort of a gray zone, with the exception of certified organic (which has a clear set of guidelines set by the USDA). Even pastured raised, it's not an official guideline recognized by the FDA or USDA. So egg companies could label their products as such without really meeting any specific guidelines. It's something to be mindful of. I get my eggs from a local source, they eat a 100% insect based diet. The yolks are almost burnt orange in color, maybe a tiny bit lighter. I've bought store bought pasture raised eggs that have the same intensity in orange before, but I've also bought some that are claimed to be pastured yet their yolks are barely any more colored then CAFO eggs. Vital Farms is a pretty good brand in my location, pretty sure they distribute nation wide as well.