Nothing, but nothing, tastes better than an egg freshly laid by a heritage hen out on pasture.  We know, because we raise them and we eat a lot of them.  The shells are thick, the yolks are bright yellow and stand up, the whites have an integrity that holds them together.  Our egg laying chickens spend their summer out on pasture free-ranging from an eggmobile,  a trailer they naturally return to every night that we can shut up to reduce nocturnal predation.  They chase bugs, eat organic grains and  scratch in the soil.  They get to be chickens.  And, of course, they have roosters with them.  In fact, one of the roosters inspired the name of the bakery on the farm, the Little Rooster Bread Company.

We use several different kinds of heritage breeds, including Silver Laced Wyandottes, Barred Rocks, Araucana (they lay green eggs— too pretty), Black Australorps and Buff Orpingtons.  Many of these are listed by the American Livestock Breeds Conservatory, an organization dedicated to preserving  old breeds.  (Check them out— they do good work.)  The eggmobile follows the cattle herds and provides the invaluable contribution of chickens enthusiastically debugging the manure.  This interrupts pathogen cycles that can occur in ruminants and allows us the luxury of no deworming.  In the wild you will see large herds of antelope being  followed by flocks of birds performing the same function.  In the winter the chickens go into the greenhouse where they kindly debug that as well.  We don’t have to use insecticides in the spring to save our seedlings.