By Uptown Farm Girl Kate Lambert
These are eggs. White, conventional, grocery store eggs. They are not organic. They are not local. They are not vegetarian-fed (I still don't get why that's a thing.)
I am going to feed these babies to my kids. Some of you are judging me. Some of you are like, "Wait?! What?! I thought you had those awesome chickens?"
I need to tell you about my awesome chickens.
We did have awesome chickens. They were inside their nice little chicken coop, eating their GMO chicken food, laying eggs like crazy little chickens. They were happy. Life was good, and so was breakfast.
And then I got on the internet. People on the internet told me I was doing it wrong. My chickens were not happy. They were not healthy. Chickens long for wide-open spaces (like the Dixie Chicks said years ago) and here mine were all cooped up.
So I let them out. This worked well for a few days. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, walking around, eating... well you don't want to know what they were eating... but everything that a chicken might find laying around a farm.
At night they would go back to the coop, eat their chicken food, and lay their chicken eggs. Life, and breakfast, were still good.
Then things went downhill fast.
The first sign was when I walked in my sheep barn and a chicken was eating out of the dog food bowl while my 110 pound livestock guardian was cowering in the corner like she had possibly had her face pecked at.
Very shortly after that the entire chicken herd migrated. They moved into my sheep barn. They started eating sheep feed, which is 108,000 times the price of chicken food. They started destroying bags of sheep mineral. And they were pooping. Everywhere.
But that wasn't the worst of it.
The last straw came when one morning, after wading through chicken poop to get to my sheep, it dawned on me. I hadn't seen any eggs. In days, there hadn't been any eggs. Life was not good, and neither was breakfast.
Here they were - run of the whole place, eating everything in site, except the chicken food, pooping on everything in site, and suddenly the eggs were no where to be found.
That was it. I was done with free range, local chickens. We told the boys the neighbor came and got the chickens to take them to a really nice, happy chicken farm. That's the story I'll stick with.
But I guarantee you two things.
1. My chickens were happier in the coop than they are now.
2. Grocery store chicken eggs - and the families that bust their tails to raise them for us - are freaking awesome.
Read more from Uptown Farm Girl Kate Lambert on her blog.
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