Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Why Eggs From Backyard, Free Range, Hens?

Guess which is which. One is a premium, "Free Range," store-bought egg, and the other is from one of my own free range, backyard hens.

I'll guess the egg on the left id your egg., corn make a orange yolk

"Free Range," when it comes to what you buy at the grocer, is a legal term. It's satisfied by a situation of hundreds of hens inside of a building that has a small hatch somewhere leading to a small strip of fenced-in dirt.

They are fed organic pellets as a staple, but most of their food is foraged by them.

Chicken will eat a dead coon

Chicken will eat anything.

But mostly tender wild greens, bugs, grubs, wild seeds and berries.

...including each other. A hen pecked bird is a sad sight.

Big problem in battery egg farms. Not so much for free range chickens.

Local farm/home grown eggs are always much darker orange yolks. Thicker, creamier. And the shells are much more substantial. Have to actually smack them on the edge of the skillet to break them. Unlike store bought eggs. Seem like all you have to do is stare at them side ways and they crack...

We have a couple families that we swap stuff and swap work with for eggs. Hate buying eggs at the store.

That flock of red chickens on the old western, fresh meat,

I’ve never had an egg regardless of branding from a store that could hold a candle to one that ate bugs, kitchen scraps and saw the sun.

We eat free range chicken eggs and I think the yoke is always darker and thicker. Duck eggs more yoke and harder shell. Just did a dozen as scotch eggs.

I grew up gathering eggs from the hen house. Nothing like a yard bird egg. If Mama wanted to cook chicken for supper I had to go kill one. The veggies for that chicken dinner came from the garden. Bacon came from a hog we butchered and a hamburger came from the cow out in the pasture. It was a good way to grow up.

I wish I could let them free-range the backyard like I use to. Too many hawks and daytime foxes in the last few years. We supplement their diet with fresh veggies and a couple of times a week with meal worms. Eggs are much better than store bought.

Nice setup.

Yolk

Thanks

Feeding the chickens with red and king salmon skeletons works too.

Thicker shells comes from an adequate calcium supply. Growing up, we sometimes bought oyster shell for our chickens, free range or (mostly) cooped.

I would love to keep chickens again. So would the local bears.

Fancy chicken gulag!

Mine would run for the driveway when I backed the sled in. They loved the carcasses.

For my fellow nerds: the red color in a yard bird's yolk comes from astaxanthin from the bugs' exoskeleton.

Likewise, the red in salmon is astaxanthin as well, and comes from bugs' (i.e. shrimp) exoskeletons.

Nevertheless, too much fish in a chicken's diet WILL transfer the taste to the eggs.

No tricks are needed to get the deep orange yolks. That's just an outgrowth of a diet rich in nutrients that comes from eating a wide variety of wild foods. This way it actually correlates to superior taste and nutrition in the eggs.

Not a gulag, a protection program.

Ours get darker when we give them carcasses, I think it is the marrow and connective tissue.

Them dbl yolkers are good mmmm

Amusing creatures to watch. We had an abandoned flock show up one day after the white silky rooster led the way. They really have an interesting work/rest cycle with the rooster keeping the hens on their toes. Took a while to find their eggs. Never caught them. Roosted in the trees. Hawks got all but the two roosters. Great eggs while it lasted.

I wonder how many eggs are used every day in the US?

23

So, are darker yolk free range eggs any better tasting, or better for you?

I’ve had both and cannot tell the difference in taste.

"free range" is a marketing term. Same feed, same chickens, same barn, just with the doors open, and most hens NEVER leave the farm. My cousin farms "organic free range" chickens, and his stories of the inspections are funnier than heck. They go in and chase some chickens out to show the inspectors they are "free range". Except they are scared to death outside and want to go back into the barn with the feed asap.

Barn yard eggs are firmer, darker, have multiple times the amounts of nutrients such as Vitamin K, and astaxanthin (a strong anti-oxidant in the vit. A family). The lipid profile is also MUCH better, with lower Omega 6 fatty acids and higher Omega 3's.

If you like dippy eggs, there is no mistaking the difference between a store bought egg and one out of your yard birds.

that is nice........!

Have a neighbor couple miles away

They raise chickens

She'll drop off a dozen every so often

They are better than Walmark's eggs......fresher too

Speaking of chickens.......

Recent large fire destroyed this place.....Oakdell

Prob still can smell the burnt feathers

https://www.ksl.com/article/50989808/fire-destroys-chicken-barn-at-oakdell-egg-farms-in-cache-county

Not necessarily.

Chickens can be fed commercial feed that is high in carotenoids and their yolks will be dark but won't have a significantly different nutritional profile from any other commercial eggs. Chickens that forage can have dark yolks as well, from the carotenoids they get in animal/insect fat, and those will have a bit higher levels of various fat soluble vitamins.

The other benefit of not eating commercial food and not foraging in contaminated areas is there will be lower levels of PFAS in their eggs.

A better comparison in my view. 2 of our eggs in the pan verses one store bought egg. All 3 brown eggs so a direct comparison. Not just the extremely noticeable difference in yolk color, but what I always see is that a store bought egg is watery by comparison, and the taste goes along with it.

Notice how all the thin white that ran around to the outside of the pan is from the yellow egg, and how the whites on our eggs are thick and stayed together. I'll eat eggs about anyway they come, but store bought eggs always taste like watery crap comparably and nobody will ever convince me different. What is obvious in visibility is also obvious in taste.

Have kept free range chickens for years, this yrs fresh batch of 12 are just starting to lay. Wouldn't be without them.

We raised and slaughtered a bunch of Rock × Cornish once.
We killed and gutted, throwing the entrails on a bucket. The kids almost revolted when they saw the remaining birds eating out of the gut bucket!

I do not eat eggs unless doctored by a Mexican place so no notice here. My wife eats them in every fashion including those that stink up my fridge.

My wife's side of the family has several nieces and nephews who now raise chickens, and we buy their eggs at every opportunity. They are so much better than store bought, that any unbiased consumer would readily agree that the home raised eggs are much richer, flavorful, and pleasant to eat and see, and cook. Now throw a duck egg or two in there every now and then, and you're really getting into a whole new level of egg "goodness". A great food. We eat a lot of them.

chickens eat grain, and so have too much omega 6

Free range, not so much.

again, "free range" is a marketing term, focused on hens, not feed. "Free range" eggs are indistinguishable from battery-hen eggs.

"omega three eggs" are also a marketing monstrosity, as many are also marketed as "vegetarian". The omega-3 comes from flax seed. Turning a chicken into a vegetarian creates runny, vapid eggs.

Barn yard or "pasture raised" hens will lay eggs with good lipid profiles and other good culinary properties.

I thought the answer to everything was 42.

I'll have to think about it.





As to eggs I get farm eggs all the time from friends. Defiantly better- certainly darker.. I had heard that perhaps sunshine also attributed to the darker color. Could be wives tale.

I believe I was the one who made that point in post number one. I'm using it here, however, in the sense that it was used before it became a legal term (i.e., the authentic sense), i.e., chickens are released from their confines first thing in the morning (not constrained by an enclosure of any kind), they put themselves up inside the hen house by dusk, and get locked up against predators till morning, at which time the process is repeated.

We are lousy gardeners, but seem to be pretty good at keeping chickens. So we give our extra eggs to a couple of neighbors who are really good gardeners, and we get plenty of goodies from their gardens. It works well for of all of us.
The chickens love to get out in the late afternoons and take a dust bath and scratch around here and there looking for bugs and seeds. Another advantage of this for us is that some of the bugs they find are really nasty things like scorpions. So while some neighbors are plagued by scorpions, we almost never see any. Our yard is a very unhealthy place to be a bug.

From experience, chickens can absolutely "DESTROY" a garden!
Sure....they will keep the bug population down, but they will also eat every bloom they can get to and a red tomato is irresistible to a chicken!

If the garden is next to the chicken yard, giant zucchinis can be cut lengthwise and thrown over the fence. The hens will hollow it out in minutes.

We've contemplated several yrs now, but our neighbor is getting 20+eggs a day and cant grow Asparagus for crap. Our Asparagus is currently booming so we barter for eggs. They are young and love the work....we be getting old and love the results
...good trade!!

Exactly.