07/30/2026
A week in the “bad place,” the drop in egg production coincided with my electric ranger needing some electrical work making it unable to tow the coops elsewhere for a couple of days, then they were moved back into the trees and chained up for (yet another) tornado warning. When I finally moved the ewes out of the way, I was able to put the coops closer to this big cedar tree they seem to like. We are up to around 40 eggs a day the last couple of days. I’ll just need to ride this molt out. Once it’s begun it just needs to run its course, and day length should still be plenty long for those hens to go back into lay before winter.
Egg prices aren’t just the cost of (the expensive organic) feed and the farmers time managing the birds, collecting and washing and packaging the eggs. There’s also a lot of expenses related to down time during the molt, equipment costs, infrastructure building, maintenance and repairs, raising new chicks (they take 5 months to begin to lay eggs, and you’re just feeding them tons of expensive organic food during that time), predator loss, freak accidents, etc. The way we care for our chickens and allow them to live, running around with complete freedom is inherently more labor and cost intensive than almost any other way to keeping chickens, but to us, the animal welfare, environmental, and nutritional differences in our eggs all make it worth it, but it’s also why there’s such a huge price difference between our eggs and the battery eggs from the grocery store.
