Free Range Chickens
Where Do Your Chickens Come From?
Our chickens arrive as day-old chicks from a hatchery in Indiana. It takes 26 weeks before the hens are ready to lay eggs. One hen will lay about 300 eggs a year.
What Does "Free Range" Mean?
Good range-reared birds usually have excellent shank color, beautiful feathering, and are inclined to be big framed birds with health and vigor.
Source: Storey's Guide to Raising Poultry.
So Where Do Your Chickens Live?
Our Free Range Chickens roam "free" during the day. They spend their days exploring the pasture and doing what chickens do best. They graze (see what they eat below), exercise, take dust baths, and learn from each other how to be chickens. Since all chickens need more than just a place to play in the sun, we've created a safe haven for them to find a drink of water, lay their eggs, roost (sleep), and choose a bite to eat. As our flock has grown, we've constructed two mobile wagons, designed to both house and protect our birds. when they're not wandering through the fields.
The chicken wagons contain waterers, nesting boxes, roosts and troughs of feed supplements. Both the large wagon doors, left open during the day (year-round), and the wire mesh floor promote good air circulation. Between the long days outside in the sun and the healthful design of the wagons, our chickens are getting lots of fresh air! The wire mesh floors allow the chicken manure to fall through to the ground below, which aids in natural recycling. This keeps the wagon environment fresh and eliminates the need for cleaning. As our wagons are moved to a new spot on the farm each day, the "all-natural" fertilizer is deposited around our pasture.
Our chickens love to move everyday, searching for new bugs, fresh grass and their next adventure. The wagons have become a "home base," where they play outside all day and lay their eggs in the nesting boxes. Our chickens wait anxiously to file out of the wagon doors every morning at sunrise. They range all day and as the sun sets they gather in the wagon, waiting for the farmer to appear and close the doors, giving them protection against predators and allowing them to find a comfy spot to settle in for the night.
What Do Your Chickens Eat?
Because of the nature of free-range flocks, 50% of our birds' diet consists of all-natural grasses, insects and worms. The other 50% of our birds' diet includes an all-natural feed and crushed oyster shells. (The oyster shells provide the chickens with calcium so the chickens can put a nice hard shell on their eggs.) When raising free-range chickens, purchased feed consumption is cut in half (versus chickens raised in confinement, which eat 100% purchased feed). The all-natural feed that we provide for our chickens supplements the feed they consume from the pasture.
We encourage our chickens to eat as much grass and bugs as they can so they can provide you with the most nutritious and tasty egg you can buy. Chickens help out by eating grasshoppers, crickets, flies, Japanese beetles, ticks, and any other bug they can find. The chickens also have access to fresh water all day long.
What Do Your Chickens' Eggs Look Like?
We currently have 4 different breeds of chickens: Rhode Island Reds, Barred Rocks, Black Australorpes, and Ameracaunas. The first 3 breeds are brown egg layers, while the Ameracaunas lay the famous blue, pink, or green eggs, which are a favorite among children.
How Nutritious Are Free Range Eggs?
Because our chickens lay their eggs in nesting boxes (in the wagon), very seldom is an egg found on the ground. Our eggs are gathered daily. They are lower in cholesterol because our hens are eating salad (grass) which lowers their cholesterol, enabling them to lay an egg with lower cholesterol. The yolks are firm and a nice dark yellow/orange. This coloring of the yolk reflects a diet with high levels of chlorophyll and low levels of saturated fat.
What does this mean for us?
Well, cholesterol isn't a problem! Some folks actually reduce their cholesterol by eating fresh forage-based eggs.
Source: Pastured poultry profits.
Healthy eggs come from happy chickens at Miller Farms! So come on by and try our delicious, low-cholesterol, fresh "Free Range" eggs!