Over the last few months, our hens have been at the forefront of our minds. As most of you know we are situated in the Wet Tropics of North Queensland just outside of a town called Millaa Millaa, which gets around 3500 mm of rain a year, and about 80 days of sunshine. This is perfect for cows – the climate means they always have lots of delicious green grass to munch on.
However the wet weather isn’t so great for chickens. Last wet season we noticed the impact on our birds, and egg production. The beginning of this year particularly saw us with some extreme weather, where we had only a handful of days of sunshine in three months! The chickens really felt that, which is when we first began to question the practicality of having pastured hens on our farms.
Coupled with this the price of Organic grain went through the roof with the droughts happening down south. Last year we could buy Organic grain for $400 a tonne, delivered to our farm. This year that price rose to $1200 for the same amount of grain.
As a family we had to face the reality that continuing with our bio-eggs was no longer viable and we started the process of rehoming our hens.
We know how much our customers love our Bio-eggs – we love them too! But with the construction of our new production facility, the creation of all of our new products, our equity crowdfunding and everything else that has been going on we decided to make the decision to let go of our hens.
The last of our flock is going to a Farm at Mt Molloy who are expanding their small scale pastured hen offerings. For those who don’t know, Mt Molloy is a lot drier than Millaa Millaa. Tony and Julie will be purchasing our hens and our grading equipment and the good news is they are happy to supply us with the eggs once the girls are settled at their new residence at “Bushy Creek Farm”. Their flock numbers will be a lot smaller to start so be patient and we hope you will support the eggs under Bushy Creek and help them grow their business.
We want to thank you for your support of our Bio-Eggs over the last 7 years – it was certainly an adventure and huge learning curve for us. Like you we all love good eggs and we can’t wait to work with Bushy Creek Farms to bring you great eggs – please support these eggs when you see them in store.
Beth, will you notify suppliers here in Cairns of the change, so they can place orders with Bushy Creek Farm.?
Hey Maggie, we certainly will! At the moment, Bushy Creek Farm are still ironing out all of the kinks and getting themselves fully set up but we will be distributing their eggs to the public soon!