Yes, there's news. It's two-fold, really. Here's the best news: we've got eggs!
The newest additions to the flock are now getting ramped up and as daylight lengthens our old layers are getting back into the groove as well. We're far from peak production, but at least we've got SOME.
For now, there are not enough eggs for me to resume deliveries, but I will make them available to those who'd like to visit the farm to pick them up. Please Facebook message, email, or text to arrange to pick up your eggs.
The other news -- you might call it bad news: we're upping the price of our eggs to $4 per dozen.
Young chickens tend to lay inconsistently-sized eggs. When the young 'uns first started laying, we'd get several of these tiny eggs and then a few double-yolkers the size of my palm!
The truth of the matter is that we'd priced our too low to begin with. We figured that $3 would at least cover our feed and packaging costs, even if it didn't pay us for our time. It turns out, though, especially since we've fed them all winter while they've produced next to nothing, we're not really even covering costs. At $4 per dozen, we're still going to be the cheapest pastured, free-range eggs to be found at any area market (Searcy and Hillcrest markets offer them for $5 and $6, respectively) and may begin to pay ourselves a bit for all the time put into chicken care, egg packaging, and delivery.
I really like to have happy customers. And, telling customers that you're going to have to increase your price is not the best way to make them happy.
But, we have good customers. We have customers who love our eggs -- and they are amazing eggs. They are the only local eggs I know of that come from chickens who are raised naturally on pasture and moved around the entire farm so that they always have fresh pasture to forage. We have customers who realize the work that goes into producing those eggs -- all the feeding, watering, wagon pulling, temporary-fence moving, egg gathering, and packaging that goes into producing the best possible egg we know how to produce.
So, thank you for being so great. I'm just hoping that you'll be so excited that we have eggs available again that you'll forgive us the other little bit of news.
Let me know if you'd like to come out and pick up some eggs. If you time your visit just right, you may even catch a goat birth next week!