Why Free Range Chickens

As Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm likes to say “free ranging allows chickens to express themselves as chickens”.  The benefits of allowing chickens to free range are legion; I’ll try to touch on the highlights here.

The core issue is nutritiion – for both the chickens and the humans who eat their eggs.  Even the best chicken feed will never come close to providing the diversity and quality of food that chickens can derive from forageing on native ecosystems. Taking bits of wild seeds and green weeds and scratching in grass and under shrubs for grubs, bugs and slugs is what chickens were born to do.  Under these conditions chickens tend to flourish, have few or no health problems, live long lives and ultimately, provide more eggs.  From the human perspective, these conditions allow chickens to provide eggs that are nutritionally superior to eggs from hens that are confined to cages and a diet of chicken feed.  In fact, these eggs will even be superior to organic eggs.  In the same way that organic dairy products are inferior to dairy products from free range dairy animals (see Why Free Range Dairy Goats On Native Forage), the only difference between conventional eggs and organic is that organic eggs are from chickens fed organically grown feed – the same mundane feed (given in the same mundane confined environement), just organically grown.  And like dairy animals that are fed mono-diets of alfalfa, chickens that are fed mono-diets of processed chicken feed are living on a diet that is sufficient to keep them alive and producing eggs but is nevertheless, not a natural diet for them.  In that the general public consumes these inferior eggs (and dairy products) says something about our overall nutrition and state of health, or lack thereof.  Even eggs labeled as organic free range do not alleviate the issues of commercial egg production.  It surprises most people to learn that organic free range chickens can spend most of their lives inside a warehouse.  Light is controlled to optimize egg laying, greatly shortening the lifespan of the hens.  Instead of only having just one square foot of room as is the case for typical commercial egg farms where hens are confined to a cage that size all their life; to qualify as free range, as little as 2 square feet per bird is all thats needed for “free range” birds in large holding pens or warehouses!

I applaud attempts to by-pass the corporate food system and go local to the point of your own back yard, but because chickens kept in pens or small backyards are usually fed the same feed as commercial chickens and don’t have access to a wide array of bugs, worms, seeds, weeds and all the other diverse things that chickens need to produce superior eggs – although the chickens may be better cared for – backyard chickens will generally produce eggs little better than commercial eggs.  Feeding backyard chickens fruit, greens and other vegetables from a garden or from dumpster diving at your local grocery store will help improve the quality of backyard eggs.  Although the fatty acid content of bugs is superior to animal fat, giving your hens occasional bits of leftovers with dairy products, meat or even eggs in it can replace the protien from bugs to some extent, but caution must be employed as an overdose of some of these things can be deadly.

After extensive research, the endangered heirloom breed of chicken known as the java was chosen as one of the breeds for Erda Kroft.  Javas were the most popular chicken on homesteads from about the mid 1800’s to the 1930’s, due to the fact that they are a good dual purpose bird (meat and eggs) and because they are strong foragers, able to garner much of their own feed when given sufficient room to free range.  Additionally, unlike modern breeds who have had many of their natural reproductive and foraging instincts bred out of them, Javas are good setters and good mothers and over the course of several generations on the same habitat – in addition to readily acclimatizing to the area – knowledge is gained and passed on to ensuing generations about how to maximize foraging and avoid predators.  These are traits that cannot be gained by ordering new chicks every spring of modern varieties that don’t even know how to be chickens. Modern breeds are bred to be fast growing egg laying machines and the unfortunate downside of this is a high mortality rate, a short lifespan and birds that don’t have a clue about forging, hatching a clutch of eggs and raising young.  In addition, compared to new chicks hatched by their mother right on the farm, chicks hatched in incubators and shipped across the country and brooded under heat lamps is not only a very energy intensive means of acquiring chickens, but much more labor intensive for the farmer.

Due to the regulatory difficulties of running a broiler operation, the focus at Erda Kroft is on egg production.  Being a dual purpoe breed we decided to increase the egg production of our javas by introducing a few red leghorns into the flock.  Leghorns were chosen because like Javas, they are excellent foragers and fend very well for themselves in our wild ecosystem here.  Leghorns are quite good flyers and often escape an attack by a predator that the larger, heavier java cannot.  The result has been nothing short of spectacular.  Java/leghorn crossed hens hatched under java mothers in late summer were laying eggs by the end of the year and haven’t looked back.  The cross flies well, is an excellent forager and is very savvy.

Instead of several square feet per bird, our birds have thousands of square feet per bird when they are ranging on our native ecosystem in the summer.  The fact that the subtropical savanna/mesquite bosque ecosystem here at Erda Kroft is one of the most bug rich habitats in the U.S is born out by the fact that in the summer our birds barely touch their supplemental mix that we grow for them. When the summer monsoon rains bring an explosion of vegetation, their yolks become so bright orange that one almost needs sunglasses to look at them!  The yolks stand up nice and firm and the white stays close to the yolk indicating a high protein content (its all those bugs). Because eggs from our free range chickens have a superior ratio of omega 3 fatty acids compared to commercial eggs, one does not need to concern oneself about cholesterol. In the winter when egg production drops off, they spend several months cleaning up large garden areas that have a much denser natural food base than our native ecosystem.  And no, lights are not used to extend the laying season.  The hens are allowed a break from egg production in the winter.  By spring they’re happy and robust and eager to start a new egg cycle.