Monday, April 30, 2007

The Color of Egg Yolks

Grass is Mother Nature’s sunshine storage unit for her creatures food use. This is the starting point for deep rich golden/orange yolk color in your eggs.

Beta carotene, or xanthophyll both are natural plant pigments. When hens are able to eat green plant material or yellow corn (factory farm hens are sometimes fed yellow dye or other supplements to color the yolks), the beta carotene concentrates in the yolk making it dark sometimes even orange.

Fresh green, growing, grass is a very important component in any chickens diet, and with Pastured hens that component is present in daily abundance.

Pasturing also produces high levels of vitamins A and E. On average, about twice as much vitamin E and 40 percent more vitamin A are in the yolks of pasture-fed birds than in confined birds

Poultry raised on fresh pasture instead of stored grain get more unsaturated fats and vitamins in their diets. “It’s like the difference between fresh and canned vegetables.

Eating eggs from pastured chickens will enrich your diet with a host of key nutrients, including beta-carotene; vitamins B12 and E; CLA, another newly discovered "good" fat called "TVA;" omega-3 fatty acids; and lutein. Meanwhile, it will reduce your intake of synthetic hormones, pesticides, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and pro-inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids.

We take all of this into account in producing our World’s Best Eggs at Coyote Creek Farm. We treat our grass as carefully as we treat our chickens. We spray compost tea on our pastures four times each year, and the we feed the biology in our soils twice each year with, Hydrolisyzed fish, molasses, kelp, and other micro nutrients. This assures that the grass that our chickens eat is nutrient dense, which makes the eggs nutrient dense, which gives you the highest quality food that is packed with Mother Nature’s very best nutrition.

1 comment:

julie said...

I am so tired of being told that eggs from hens that are kept in barns and treated like egg factories have the same nutritional value as the eggs with bright yellow/orange yolks from hens that roam freely in a pasture. The eggs you describe simply HAVE to be healthier for us.