If you’ve ever seen chickens in a natural environment, you’ll understand why they enjoy following our cattle around the pasture rotation from spring through fall. Fresh air, bright sunshine, healthy exercise, yummy bugs, and seeds… What’s not to like if you’re a chicken?
They’re also doing an important job in keeping our pastures healthy. Their foraging and scratching activities help spread the cows’ natural fertilizer, reduce flies and parasites, and keep the weed population down.
A Natural Diet is Best
The cattle move to fresh pastures at least once a day and their faithful chicken flock follows them. That means the chickens are always on fresh grass with a new ‘crop’ of bugs, seeds, and grass to enjoy. This type of varied and natural diet produces the kind of eggs our great-grandparents enjoyed. They’re richly flavored with a deep, orangish-yellow yolk that stands tall. No pale, deflated, and nearly tasteless yolks in these eggs!
The Unnatural Diet of Chickens Raised in Confinement
Most commercially-produced eggs come from chickens living in confinement systems. Because the birds can’t forage for their own meals, they’re fed commercial diets based mostly on field corn or soybeans. Both of those crops are highly genetically engineered (GMO). We’re proud to promise that none of our animals consume corn, soy, or any other GMO products! Only organic, natural foods are good enough for our chickens and other livestock.
Healthier Birds Lay Healthier Eggs
Our healthy, rotationally-grazed pastures produce healthy livestock. Those healthy animals produce healthy food for us in return. Whether it’s beef, lamb, broiler chickens, or eggs, a healthy diet and environment show in the final product.
Meat produced on the nutritious grasses of our ranch tastes richer than the often insipid flavor of meat produced in stock pens. The same is true of our eggs. Some people claim that eating eggs from chickens fed a vegetarian diet are somehow ‘ideal’. Our hens know better – they love their grasshoppers and worms! In return for their true free-range diet, they lay eggs that are not only better for you, they’re better tasting, too.
Try Rafter W Ranch’s pasture-raised eggs and taste the difference for yourself!