Our Values
Animal Welfare
Broody Hens Allowed to Hatch out Chicks
Most chickens lay their eggs when “nature calls” and then immediately get off the nest to resume their regularly scheduled chicken activities, never to think about that egg again. When chickens get the biological urge to hatch out eggs, that is called “broodiness”.
Our broody hens are given the opportunities to hatch out chicks and be moms. We have a separated brooding space with outside access. The rest of the flock can see them, but not touch them, so the mom and babies can bond safely.
We Don’t Cull Male Chicks
Large scale hatcheries cull male chicks on hatch day simply for being male. Many suburban areas do not allow backyard chicken keepers to keep roosters, so they dispose of the males and sell the female chicks to feed stores.
While our hatching operations are quite small, we will allow our male chicks to grow up with their siblings, then upon maturity we will integrate them to our separate, rooster-only “bachelor flock” or re-home them to a home where they will receive love and care.
We Keep a “Bachelor Flock” of Roosters
Roosters will fight over the hens and over-breed them if chicken keepers don’t keep their rooster population to the necessary minimum (anywhere from 10-15 hens per rooster). However, roosters can co-exist peacefully together if there are no hens visible or present to fight over. The roosters with great disposition and strong genetics can be housed for breeding or security purposes with our laying hens, but this is not necessary to “earn their keep”.
We give roosters a happy life on our farm because we have the space to do so!
Luxurious & Spacious Predator-Proof Chicken Runs
The universal recommendation for contained backyard chickens is that they have 10 square feet per bird in their run. We spared no expense constructing our chicken run — in addition to being roofed and fully predator proof, it is also significantly larger and offers our birds closer to 30 square feet per bird.
Free Range Access
In addition to their spacious predator-proof chicken runs, our chickens also have automatic chicken doors to access our fenced in orchard. We have planted our trees densely and added many shrubs like lavender, rosemary, and blueberries to ensure they have shade, places to hide, and yummy snacks to forage.
We Nurse Our Hens Back to Health…..
Over our years of keeping chickens, we have encountered many ailments that commonly affect chickens. We’ve dealt with mites, lice, being egg bound, sprained legs, bullies, poopy vents, internal worms, bumblefoot, chicks hatched with neurological and physical deformities, and probably more.
We successfully nursed our 3 year old Olive Egger “Buckbeak” back to health over the course of 5 months. You can read more about Buckbeak’s story here.
….. Even If It Requires an Expensive Vet Trip
We also have been known to drive over an hour to the nearest chicken vet when we felt an expert’s assistance was necessary. We brought our 3 week old chick “Gucci” to the vet and paid $145 for the vet to examine her leg to help us determine if it was only sprained or the tendon had slipped. He thought we were completely insane to drive all that way and spend all that money on a $6.99 feed store chick, and maybe we are, but they are our pets and we care deeply about them.
You can read more about Gucci’s story here.
We Provide Enrichment Opportunities
Our chicken runs are filled with all the things that make chickens happy. Piles to scratch through, perches to fly up on, dangling treats to peck, logs and ladders and swings… We do our best to make our chicken spaces emulate their natural habitats so they can live fulfilled lives doing what chickens do best.
We Let Our Hens Work the Compost Pile
We allow our hens access to the orchard for the foraging opportunities it provides, but this also enables them to fertilize our orchard with their droppings, scratch and aerate the soil, and accelerate the breakdown of compost. In addition to streamlining our efforts, the hens love it!!
We Farm Worms & Bugs for Healthy, Happy Hens
We raise soldier fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets to supplement their diet in a nutritionally-impactful way. We do not feed scratch or grain, because they lead to weight and health issues. Our chickens completely lose their mind for their treats! Our chickens have been known to come running when they hear the treat bag rustling, and vocalize their displeasure when you come by empty-handed.
Meat Birds
Cornish Cross is the standard meat bird that is raised and slaughtered in as little as 6 to 8 weeks. This breed has been genetically modified and bred to favor rapid weight gain and insatiable hunger to accommodate such an early slaughter. This decreases feed costs and increases the number of birds that can be raised per year in a given space, but the true cost is the sacrifice of animal welfare. Meat bird raisers say that slaughtering Cornish Cross around the 8 week mark is the humane thing to do, because if they continue to grow, their legs won’t be able to support their weight leading to untimely death and suffering. However, our approach is different — in our opinion, the humane things to do is to NOT raise Cornish Cross meat birds.
We raise non-GMO broilers, who do not experience accelerated growth or lose their foraging ability like Cornish Cross do. This is at greater cost to us, because they take more time and more space to raise. We raise non-GMO broilers, because animal welfare matters most.
Nutrient Rich, Ethically Farmed Eggs
Plain & Simple: healthy chickens with an optimized, varied, and biologically-appropriate diet are going to lay healthier eggs.
Chickens are omnivores (unlike what that “premium” carton of “vegetarian-fed” eggs at the grocery store tells you). Chickens will be healthiest when they are able to forage protein sources like bugs, grubs, worms — even small animals like rodents, frogs, lizards, and snakes.
Our birds are given the opportunity to forage our orchard from sun up to sun down, and we also supplement their diet to ensure no nutritional gaps or deficiencies.
Weekly Beef Liver & Organ Meat
We supplement their diet with beef liver, organ meat, and other trimmings once a week. This gives them a huge boost of nutrition and they absolutely LOVE it.
Organic Chicken Feed
Free-ranging and foraging alone is not enough to guarantee excellent nutrition. Offering organic layer chicken feed guarantees our birds receive the optimum levels of protein, calcium, and more.
Daily Treats of Worms & Bugs, Farmed by Us with Lots of Love
In addition to allowing the birds to forage their own bugs and worms, we farm soldier fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets to spoil our girls, because they deserve it! This ensures that even our girls that aren’t great foragers get their fill of yummy bugs to lay delicious eggs.
Organic Herb Gardens, Just for Them
There are several organic herb gardens that we tend throughout the orchard so they are able to snack on basil (their favorite), lavender, rosemary, mint, marigold (calendula), sage, thyme, oregano, and more.
We also add dried herbs, flower petals, and peppers with great homeopathic evidence of supporting bird health.
Whole Food Ingredients
A major part of my health journey and the efforts I’ve made to improve my son’s health with nutrition has been to break-up with convenience products laced with artificial ingredients and fillers, and start cooking from scratch with whole-food ingredients.
When my labs were “normal” but I felt sicker than ever and was experiencing unexplained infertility, I was able to reverse my symptoms and grow my family through diet alone. We still have a lot of progress to make on my son’s health journey, but we’ve seen encouraging progress along the way.
For a full list of ingredients we use in our kitchen, please see our Allergen Information page.
For recipe-swap ideas to clean up your cooking, view our blog post here.
Seed Oils, Never
All of the bakery items we offer are made without seed oils, which can cause inflammation in the body and can exacerbate any ongoing health issues.
In lieu of seed oils, we use: avocado oil, coconut oil, tallow (beef fat), duck fat, and bacon grease.
It wasn’t until I eliminated seed oils from my diet and replaced cooking oils with animal fats, avocado oil, and coconut oil that my body was able to release inflammation and start to heal. My eczema and psoriasis went away, my skin cleared, my cortisol regulated, my energy returned, and my low progesterone reversed. My secondary infertility was reversed.
Read my health history blog posts to learn more about my story.
We Choose Organic
As a hobby farm and homestead, pursuing the USDA organic certification is not practical or feasible. For this reason, we are unable to sell the produce, eggs, or meat we produce labeled as “organic”.
However, we always choose organic, safe options for:
Chicken Feed
Chicken Treats
Pest Control Products
Garden Fertilizers
Bakery Ingredients
So while we do not claim to be an organic farm due to the barriers preventing us to become certified as so, we can promise you this:
We will always choose to invest our time and money to choose organic and holistic alternatives on our farm — for the health of our animals, our family, and your family.
Interested to see what products and brands we use on our farm? Read our blog post here for more information.
Our recipes have been formulated through trial and error in our kitchen as a way to eliminate seed oils, artificial dyes, artificial flavors, and artificial preservatives from our family’s diet.
We have found that reducing our reliance on convenience products and eliminating questionable and controversial ingredients from our pantry has increased our autistic son’s ability to self-regulate, focus, and communicate effectively.
For us, cooking from scratch wasn’t about saving money — we wanted to take back control over what we were putting in our body. We want to extend this opportunity to your family, too.
Our promise to you is that we will cook for your family the way we cook for our family — we will always opt for better, more expensive ingredients because your family’s health also comes first.
We want to put products in your family’s hand you can trust, because you know we are going to choose your health over profit, always.
Health Over Profit, Always
Green Waste Dropoff
Are you interested in doing something for the environment but don't have the resources, time, or space to start composting your waste?
We run a green waste delivery program. If you collect your green waste, you can drop off your green waste at our farm and we will compost it for you! This will help us in our initiative to increase sustainability and our initiative to decrease waste.
Your green waste will be put to use on our farm:
Putting our chickens to work, allowing them to scratch through for bugs and aerate the waste
Being fed to worms that create rich compost for the garden and delicious treats for our chickens
Feeding our orchard and gardens with organic matter to increase yield and plant health while avoiding big box chemicals.
Collect and donate your green waste and we will put it to use on our farm!
Egg Carton Return or Donation
To achieve our sustainability initiative, we look for opportunities to reduce waste by reusing and recycling. One of the most obvious ways we can do this is to re-use egg cartons — but we need your help to do this.
We will gladly repurpose used egg cartons for future orders, whether the egg carton came from us or somewhere else.
When we have to purchase egg cartons, we will choose the most sustainable materials available to us. However, we will also package your eggs with any donated egg carton material made available to us, including plastic.
We look to reduce plastic use as its feasible to do so, but re-using plastic that has already been produced is also a form of sustainability because it decreases demand for the production of new plastic and keeps used plastic out of the landfill.
Help us protect the environment by re-using egg cartons by collecting and donating your used cartons to us.
Composting Chicken Waste
With the number of chickens we have, there is no shortage of chicken droppings and spent bedding. We compost all chicken waste to put it to use in our garden. We believe this is an impactful sustainability effort that improves the quality of our soil, and the bounty of our harvest.
Chicken waste is a hot compost that can take up to a year to fully break down before it is garden ready, but we feel the time and effort is well spent to put our chicken waste to use in our garden.
To achieve our sustainability initiative, we look for opportunities to re-use materials as much as possible for infrastructure or chicken enrichment.
We will gladly take used pallets and use them to construct perches, hiding spots, chicken swings, and more to give our chickens enrichment opportunities to spend more of their day acting like chickens out of confinement and free from boredom.
We also are constructing our composting areas solely with pallets and reclaimed materials.
Pallet Donation
