Before visiting my sister I thought all I had to look for when perusing the egg section was organic and vegetarian fed, boy was I wrong. There is a little more that goes into it.
And did you know that chickens are not meant to be vegetarian, no matter what your premium carton of organic/grain-fed/cage-free eggs tells you? Chickens are omnivores by nature and their healthiest diets include meats, such as mealworms, beetles, grasshoppers, grubs, and whatever creepy-crawly they can pull out of the ground.
Next time you go shopping look for the words Free To Forage. That means that the hens are allowed to find their own food from the ground. My sister has an insect box, where she farms worms and other insects, which means her yard is crawling with the kinds of things hens love to eat. You want eggs from a farm that doesn’t just feed them an organic vegetarian diet, they need insects as well as greens!
Let your ladies roam a pasture.
A healthy chicken needs room to roam, to pick food from the earth. Chickens kept in coops all day will not yield the healthy eggs we are looking for.
Once you get your eggs home there is an easy way to detect if the farm you have purchased from is producing the most nutritious eggs, the yolk color test.
Orange yolks are an indication of a well balanced and highly nutritious diet.
Before visiting my sister and seeing her bright orange yolks the eggs I bought had pale yellow centers. Now that I know what to look for the eggs I buy are a lot closer in color to my sister’s homegrown batches. Someday maybe I will have my own coop, but for now I rely on buying from farmers who practice the same type of chicken farming as my sister does in her little backyard farm.
For more information visit: Powerful Primates
Love this :p