MORE people are discovering cakes rise and breakfast tastes better with free-range eggs, writes ANDREW MOLE

A dozen eggs is not what it's cracked up to be.

At least not like the good old days when a dozen eggs was just that - 12 little cackleberries plucked off the shelf.

Now there is the decimal dozen - a trap for young players who think they have grabbed 12 of the best. And then there are caged eggs, barn eggs, omega 3 eggs and sizes ranging from small up to 90g boomers.

But in the egg business, the holy grail is the free ranger, the one squeezed out by contented chooks roaming in the open.

Anne Westwood and her husband, Philip, are free-range egg producers at Grantville in West Gippsland.

They have been at it for a dozen years (seriously) and now run 1000 birds yet they can't keep up with demand.

Their Freeranger eggs go to farmers' markets, local stores, restaurants, a hotel, a health food store, a pizzeria and some home deliveries.

Once a sheep and cattle farmer, Anne admits a failure of her sponge cake to rise hatched her egg venture.

"A fox got our house chooks so I had to buy some eggs from a supermarket," she said.

"They were awful and no, my sponge did not rise.

"So we thought surely we could do a better job and started buying hens, which we would run on about 23ha of cleared land that had already been divided into paddocks for horses."

The Westwoods birds are now run in groups of 200 according to age and are exclusively Isa Browns.

They tried other breeds but found they failed to consistently deliver the bigger eggs their market wanted.

"We have so many standing orders for our mega eggs," Anne said.

"That is 80g and bigger."

By bigger she means a mind-boggling 110g although fortunately, for the sake of the hens, production averages 65-75g.

"We did receive an email from one customer showing a breakfast in which two eggs were double yolkers and the other a triple," Anne said.

She said other breeds, primarily developed as caged birds, tended to produce eggs averaging 55-60g.

The older the hen, the bigger the egg.

But in this business, old is no more than three years, at which time Anne's birds are pensioned off as pets and house chooks to enthusiastic buyers.

Another early lesson was fox predation.

"I was sitting having a cuppa when I saw a fox go by with one of our hens in its mouth," Anne recalls with horror.

"I was straight on the phone to a Maremma breeder I had read about in The Weekly Times. We now have six of them - plus a Breton Pyrenean Mastiff - and that was the end of the foxes.

"Our only loss now is to an occasional eagle."

When Anne talks free range she means it. Her hens are out in the open, day and night, rain, hail or shine. They are happy to use the sheds for laying eggs but have developed a passion for roosting in the gum trees, often 10m off the ground.

"When people come to buy the hens Phillip has to use a wire to pull them down. The trick, he has worked out, is to wait for them to jump on to the first branch and then grab them," Anne said. "It hurts not to be smarter than a chook."

Anne is critical of the egg industry and its retailing. She said some eggs could be six weeks old before they are stamped and released on to supermarket shelves.

A rule of thumb is that if eggs are uniform in colour then the chooks laying them have almost certainly been fed colouring.

Anne said old eggs tend to spread in the frying pan, and if used in sponges the cakes generally won't rise as well as expected.

"I know so much now that I never even thought about, and the more I know the more cynical I have become," she said.

"Our hens are fed a special recipe, which we have made up for us."

It has a minimum protein of 18 per cent, which is soymeal based.

It also includes a mash of beans, lentils and occasionally our kitchen scraps.

"Shell consistency is also important, which is why we turn our birds over as often as we do," Anne said.

The older they get the more brittle their shells become.

"Our replacement hens come from Euroa where a breeder has them living in free-range conditions from six weeks of age so they are ready to go as soon as they get here," she said.

With 1000 birds, Freeranger produces an average 800 eggs a day.

Nearly all of the birds lay in the sheds "with their nice little nesting boxes" as they are moved around the paddocks but the odd troublemaker prefers the outdoors.

Those eggs are the exclusive property of the dogs.

But even with 5600 eggs a week they are still in production debit.
Which, Anne said, was a nice place to be.
 
Sadly, there is no chook-poo by-product to value-add the business. The sheds have mesh bottoms and the paddocks are cross grazed with Suffolk meat sheep and some horses.

Touching wood, Anne said there had been no health or disease issues in their flocks, and they had been able to build their business on the cheap because they already had the land. The Westwoods are also big on cost control and their carbon footprint.

They won't deliver eggs if it takes more than an hour to drive, or is more than 100km away.