The producer: The lay of the land

The happy, healthy free-range hens of Dargyl Valley lay the best breakfast eggs, says Shelley Seid

For the past three years, Craig and Vicky Alison have produced free-range eggs from their farm, Highveld Stud. Based in the idyllic Dargyl Valley of the KwaZulu- Natal Midlands, their 8000 Lohmann Brown and Rhode Island Red chickens produce an average of 7300 eggs a day. That may sound like a lot of omelettes, but if their birds were caged they would have space for five times that number.

The Alisons, however, decided to base their farming on the UK's "five freedoms", a set of recommendations for the welfare of poultry. These include freedom from hunger and thirst; freedom from discomfort; freedom from pain, injury or disease; freedom to express natural behaviour; and freedom from fear and distress.

"We are not bunny-huggers," says Vicky, "but we want to farm in the old-fashioned way; like the days when everyone had a coop in the backyard with a couple of chickens that would provide eggs to eat and when the chickens stopped laying you would cut off their heads and eat them."

Highveld Stud is a happy farm with happy chickens. The birds are given feed and they also eat grass and veggie cuttings. No hormones are added to their food nor "stuff to make the eggshells harder". Chicken houses are set up in a wagon wheel shape and each chicken house opens onto a different field. "We work on a rotation system," explains Vicky. "Our free-range cows eat the long grass and fertilise the field, which brings more worms, and then the chickens come in, and so it goes. It's very symbiotic, how one lives off the other."

The Alisons originally bred exotic birds - parrots, macaws and the like - but the bird flu ban closed down the overseas market and the local market became cut-throat. The couple looked at their options and decided that free-range eggs was a viable niche market.

It's not been easy. Firstly, no one in the vicinity raises free-range birds for laying, so the Alisons had to buy in 18- week-old birds raised in cages. Their first batch of birds was put on the floor. When it got dark (the chickens were used to continual artificial lighting to accelerate laying) the birds got nervous and flocked to a corner. In the morning, 500 had been crushed. "We had no one to learn from," says Vicky. "We now put stuff in to block the corners and have introduced many more perches. We find the chickens suffer badly from stress when they are moved from a cage to a free-range environment. When we put them on the floor, you can almost hear them think: 'Oh look, I have legs, I can walk!'"

The chickens also need to learn where to lay their eggs. "When we first get them they lay all over the place - on the floor, outside in the grass - but slowly they take to the nesting boxes and once a chicken has claimed a box it's hers for life." Craig and Vicky have now decided to raise their own chicks - yet another expense and another learning curve.

At about 72 weeks the chickens stop laying regularly and are then sold, mostly for meat. But lately, says Vicky, people have been buying them for their backyards. "The chickens will be reasonable producers for at least another three years. I'd love to retire them and put them out to pasture, but everything has to come to an end at some point - even for a free-range chicken."

• Midlands Free-Range Eggs are available at Spar and Pick n Pay stores in Pietermaritzburg and the KZN Midlands. For more information, contact Vicky on 0722524084.