Tangled Thicket Farm keeps a flock of between 50-100 birds
Egg production is not a primary purpose of our farm, but we keep chickens for a variety of reasons:
→ They are such weird little dinosaurs. We cannot help but to find joy in watching their antics and feral behaviors.
→ Eggs are delicious, and a wonderful add-on for our CSAs. We also provide them on our farmstand when they are available.
→ We compost chicken droppings with our other compostables and add the mixture as a fertilizer for our fruits and vegetables after decomposition.
→ Chickens are pretty decent at weed and pest management, and keep us on our toes with mulch application.
Practices and Labels
Our chickens are entirely free-range, and in fact, we have to work hard to keep them from taking over the world. If you visit us, you will see them wandering along the side of the road, blocking paths, scratching under trees, pulling mulch out, and darting in to devastate our harvests if we don’t keep an eye on them. (Don’t worry; they are fenced out of our production fields and hoophouses).
We do try to keep our chickens in an 1-acre enclosure when predators seem particularly devastating. And we pay careful attention when bird diseases (like the current avian flu) are regionally present. We do not keep waterfowl to help with this potential problem.
Our eggs are not Certified Naturally Grown, like our vegetables, fruit and herbs. We find this label cost-prohibitive for several reasons, but primarily due to feed costs. We supplement with excellent organic options like Scratch & Peck Feeds (local) and Modesto Milling, but our main feed is bought through a co-op from Natural Farm Feed. NFF is certified corn-, soy-, and GMO- free, and is local from Spokane. They are not certified organic, but when asked about use of pesticides, they report being spray-free. We like the way their feed looks, and the chickens do well with it.
We try hard to keep our egg prices down, as we know how important this nutritious staple is in a world of unhealthy options. Unfortunately, low egg prices are mostly a byproduct of poor feed and even poorer conditions for chickens. Our egg prices are currently $10/dzn at markets, $9/dzn at our farmstand, and $8.5/dzn for CSA members. We hope you find the eggs as beautiful and incredibly delicious as we do!
2025 MVC Award
We are happy to award this highly coveted honor to our oldest standing hen, Beyoncé. Every year she goes broody. Every. Single. Year. She draws blood if you try to take her eggs. She scythes through you with her stare. And so we give her chicks. This past year, we lost a hen with three chicks to a raccoon, and after a half-hour’s worth of scrambling around, we gave the resulting chicks to Beyoncé. And, as she does every year, Beyoncé accepted them as her own. Each adopted clutch is defended with her life and set of lungs. No other chicken dares give Beyoncé grief, and her little ones almost always make it to adulthood. Thank you, Beyoncé, for being a part of our lives.