We're slowly learning a lot about food, animals, and homesteading in general. Case in point, laying hens.

We're just at the point now where we have enough hens to provide all the eggs our family eats, and we eat a lot of eggs! Our egg yolks are typically nice and dark orange, a sharp contrast to grocery store eggs and even "farm fresh" eggs where the hens might be cooped up all day and have a diet consisting mostly of feed, rather than grass and bugs. We know because, well, we've bought grocery store eggs all of our lives and we've been buying "farm fresh" eggs, where the chickens eat primarily feed, for about two years now -- there's a big difference! Daniel broke one of our eggs the other day and Brandi said when she was cleaning it up it was like cleaning up orange paint, a very good thing. Thus, the key to the best farm eggs is birds that can free-range.

We have a pretty good free-ranging schedule for our birds. Yes, I say "schedule" because that's what it is. We figured out early on that if we let the whole flock of 10 to 13 birds out at the same time, they can wreak havoc on our neighbor's porch. :-) So we devised a schedule where only 3 or 4 birds are ranging at a time, and when the flock is separated like that the free-ranging birds don't have a tendency to wander off from our property. The birds that are cooped for that period of time are actually not in their coop, but rather in a roughly 500 square-foot fenced-off yard adjacent to our house. So even the "cooped" birds are able to breath fresh air and scratch around and look for bugs. (We do have a true coop that we utilize; it's where the chickens sleep at night.)

Brandi made a good point yesterday and said, "We could buy organic feed and keep our chickens cooped all day, and that would be considered organic." Indeed, it would be organic, but it wouldn't be the best. Right now I'd estimate that our chickens get about 15 percent of their diet from feed (non-organic) and about 85 percent from grass and bugs (beyond organic). During the summer time, when bugs are plentiful, I'm expecting them to only get about 5 to 10 percent of their calories from feed.

So the moral of the story is, if you can have free-ranging birds, go for it! It doesn't get any better than that.