It's harvest season on the farmers' markets are packed. Hooray! Hey, where did all the eggs go?

Last week, for the first time this year, I ran out of eggs before the farmer's market closed.

One of the sad things about being in the free-range egg business is that the seasonal peak in egg production (April and May) is horrendously mismatched with the seasonal peak in farmer's market customers (August and September).

This is a hard problem without a very good solution. (Telling people that they should buy a whole fryer instead of eggs, because a chicken is nothing but an experienced egg, doesn't work!) It's made even more difficult because demand slackens after September, and it's hard to engineer a two-month egg peak in the wrong season.

So it works out the same as always: get to the market early for the best selection. You snooze, you lose. That's true of everything, not just my eggs.

Chickens like short grass and do poorly in tall grass. I can see this as I mow the pasture, because the chickens get excited about the foraging prospects of the newly mown swath, rushing around excitedly looking for bugs and yummy young plants revealed once the tall grass has been cut.

Grass has few calories but lots of vitamins and protein. Chickens can only digest grass if it's young and it still bright green. Once it starts to fade, they lose interest.

Physically, tall grass is an impediment to them, preventing them from going where they want. It also triggers annoying behaviors like laying eggs in the grass rather than in the nest houses, and encouraging them to hunker down and hide rather than run when frightened, raising the possibility that they'll allow the tractor to run them down. I've only ever killed one chicken with the mower. That was enough.

Back in the good old days, there was some research done along these lines, and mowing the grass down to two inches tested out as being optimum. Six inches was too high.

I'm a big fan of permanent pasture (never plow, never reseed), since it combines the minimum amount of work with the maximum amount of pasture-plant diversity. So I'm not up on which plants would be best if you were starting with a plowed field. In general, at this time of year you should plant a grass or clover that will stay green all summer and do well if mown down to two inches. In the fall, you want a grass that will stay green all winter and do well if equally short.

We're dropping our prices this week. There's no more room in the refrigerator, so we need to drum up some extra sales. Since there are other egg vendors at the Saturday Farmer's Market, undercutting their cheapest eggs with our cheapest eggs ought to draw in some bargain-conscious customers.

Setting prices is a screwy business. Most farmers are too insecure to do it well, and end up setting their prices too low, increasing the odds that they will fail. Just the concept of, "What's the right price?" is pretty much an imponderable: a question with so many ramifications that your mind can spin around in tight little circles forever.

So we let our refrigerator set our prices for us. The process is almost entirely brainless. It works like this: If our refrigerator is full of unsold eggs, it's time to lower prices. If there are tumbleweeds blowing through an empty refrigerator, it's time to raise prices. That's all there is to it.

Once you let the prices float, your attention shifts to more important things, namely: "What can I do so customers enthusiastically help to empty my refrigerator in spite of high prices?"

Step One is to have the best eggs ever. Life is way easier if your customers stick to you like glue and spread the news by word-of-mouth because your product is so good.

Step Two is to get people to notice. Let's face it, eggs have zero mindshare with most people. If your refrigerator is bulging with eggs, one effect of lowering your prices is to draw in some skeptics who wouldn't try your product at the old price. If your stuff is the best, some of the skeptics will become converts. Sales are the simplest way to move this process along.

Step Three is to scatter instantly grasped indicators of what you are, so people get it. Wearing overalls and a straw hat at the farmers' market, having pictures of happy hens on green grass, smiling, and not being a jerk to your customers are all good. (Don't wear clothes that feel too much like a costume, though, unless you like that sort of thing. If you go all stiff and unnatural, it doesn't help.) People have this range of mental images of what a farmer ought to be. If you happen to fit one of them, flaunt it.

But avoid slickness. If you live on a real farm, slickness tends to be outside your grasp anyway, because everything you own gets muddied, faded, and battered. Customers are aware of this on some level.

It must be spring. The grass is getting way out of hand, but it's too wet to mow. This happens every year.

Chickens on free range like short grass. Back in the Golden Age of scientific poultrykeeping (roughly 1910-1960), this sort of thing was researched. Chickens did best on grass that was 2" high. Once it reached 6" it became a barrier to foraging. If it gets even taller, the chickens are confined to a few paths through the tall grass.

Tall grass also shorts out electric fence and can conceal predators. A field that is kept short has a lot of succulent, green regrowth, and bright green grass is the only kind that provides any nutrition for chickens. This nutrtion, by the way, consists of more vitamins than you can shake a stick at, some protein, but no calories.

Rain, rain, go away!

Back before people had nutritional science figured out, the key to success was to let livestock (and people) pick and choose from a wide variety of foodstuffs. Confined animals (and people) fared poorly. Sailors suffered from scurvy at sea, and people in institutions suffered from pellagra, but the same people never had these problems when given a little freedom, even though they knew nothing about nutrition. They just listened to their cravings.

Nutritional science means that you can get away with giving livestock (and people) a balanced diet without any food choices, but that doesn't mean it's always the right thing to do.

The most time-honored method of feeding chickens a balanced diet is cafeteria-style feeding. The original method included "chicken mash" (a mix of grains, steamed beef scrap, and other ingredients) in one trough, grain in another trough, oyster shell in a third, and pasture or hand-fed green feed on the side. The chickens were left to figure out how much of each ingredient to eat. This works quite well.

You can take advantage of the fact that the chickens won't starve in the midst of plenty in the following way: always provide a feeder full of a quality, balanced chicken feed, and offer anything else you've got on the side. If the chickens like the side offering, great. If they don't, they'll just ignore it and eat the balanced ration. This method leverages the fact that the chickens are better judges of chicken feed than we are. Practically the only way to poison or starve your chickens is to force them to eat an inappropriate feed by offering them nothing else. If you give them at least one decent alternative, they'll be okay.

I feed a high-protein layer ration in one feeder and whatever grain is cheapest in another. I feed a second grain as scratch feed, scattering it in the grass. Hand-feeding keeps the hens friendly. Oyster shell goes into yet another feeder. Grain is usually cheaper than a balanced ration, so you can save a little money by feeding it on the side.

For some reason, lots of people don't like the idea of separate feeders, and want to mix everything up. Don't do that. It wastes your time and annoys the chickens. Other people prefer superstition to science, and go out of their way to find a hippie-dippy feed formula, or feed nothing but grain. Don't do that, either. When humans adopt ludicrous diets, they minimize the damage they do to themselves through the miracle of cheating. Your livestock have no such option, so their diets need to live up to a higher standard than ours.

So now you know the secret: a feeder full of high-quality chicken feed gives you the freedom to try anything else on the side and see what happens.

Every time I go out on the pasture, I have to feed the chickens some scratch feed. They come running out, eager for a treat, and it's really hard to look at all those expectant faces and disappoint them. Besides, it's a good practice. By feeding your animals kinda-sorta by hand, they come a lot tamer, you become a lot more attached to them, and you get a good look at them, close up and in good light.

I didn't always do this. For a while, I just kept the range feeders topped off and didn't feed anything by hand. But the whole exercise of poultrykeeping became mechanical -- just another chore. And the free-range egg biz doesn't pay anywhere near well enough unless you enjoy it. Things got better when I started using scratch feed again.

I use whole grains, usually about a gallon or so. You want to feed enough that every chicken can get some, even the timid and the latecomers, but you want it all to be gone within a few minutes. If there's still grain leftover from last time when it's time to give them some more, they don't much care about the new feeding. Sorta defeats the purpose.

I broadcast the grain into the grass, as if I were sowing the seed rather than feeding it. I like to cover the area thinly, covering an area roughly a hundred yards long and a few feet wide. I try to do this in the greenest, cleanest grassy area available. If the grass is reasonably short, the chickens will find every single grain. Ground grains or finely cracked grains will be wasted, though. They shouldn't be fed on the ground. The chickens scratch up the ground looking for the grain, so the area looks a little shopworn after a few feedings, so using new patches of grass each time is a good idea.

You get extra credit for using a kind of grain that's different from what they have all day long. Usually we have whole corn in some of the feeders, so something else -- whole wheat or whole oats -- works best as a scratch grain. Chickens like variety.

If the chickens seem unusually happy to see you, your feeders are probably going empty. If they act as if you don't exist, either you overfed them last time or something has happened to put them off their feed -- being chased by a dog, for instance.

Most chickens will rush out for a treat (including the ones loitering in the nest boxes and who otherwise make it hard to collect the eggs). The ones that don't are likely broody or sick. Separating the sheep from the lambs in this way makes it easier to spot the ones that need attention.

Let's do the math. There were 76 billion eggs laid by US chickens last year (not counting hatching eggs), laid by 280 million hens (23 dozen eggs per hen). The vast majority of these hens are in factory farms. Suppose we wanted to get rid of factory farms. What would it take?

Well, before factory farms there were ordinary farm flocks. Between about 1900 and 1950, a typical "egg farm" held steady at about 1,500 hens. Some had more, some had less, but a farm family making most of its income from eggs typically had a 1,500-hen operation.

This makes sense when you realize that studies of labor efficiency on old-fashioned egg farms measured productivity at 2.0-2.5 hours per hen per year. A 1,500-hen operation would take between 3,000 and 3,750 hours of labor, which will soak up the time of two wage-earners.

Factory-farm techniques allowed the number of hens per attendant to increase to the current astronomical levels (around 150,000 birds per henhouse, with multiple houses per installation, and only one attendant per henhouse.)

280,000,000/1,500 = is about 187,000 egg farms that would have to be created, providing jobs for 187,000 new farm families. A 1,500-hen flock should lay (at 23 dozen eggs/hen) 34,500 dozen eggs per year.

Now, the median household income last year was about $50,000. Presumably, we can't get rid of factory farms without paying an average wage, so we need to extract $50,000 of wage income per 1,500 bird flock. $50,000/$34,500 = $1.45 per dozen (as opposed to only about $0.0145 per dozen for the factory farm). That pays the farmer. Because the farmer only receives about half the retail price of the eggs, the consumer will have to pay about $2.90 extra for non-factory-farmed eggs.

This cost premium is more than the price of a dozen factory-farmed eggs (around $2.25 the last time I looked). Various other economies of scale that benefit factory farms won't be available to smaller farms, so I figure that, in rough terms, non-factory-farmed eggs will triple the cost -- in round numbers, $7.00 a dozen.

That's for old-time confinement operations, which would have eggs that taste just as bad as factory-farmed eggs. Real free range eggs (not the fake kind that produces the eggs in the stores) cost more to produce. The labor efficiency isn't that much worse, but production plummets in poor weather and there are predator issues. I figure that the costs will work out to around five times as much as factory-farmed eggs -- $10-$12 a dozen.

True free-range farmers are thin enough on the ground that most of them can sell all their eggs locally, which is why you can't get them in the city. Eggs are cheaper in the country, so eggs you buy from me for $5 would cost you $10 in the big city.

I'm sure you've noticed that real, grass-fed free-range eggs aren't available in city supermarkets, and that they're pretty rare even in the country. Not only that, but the few farmers who produce them rarely expand their operations. At best, they keep the same number of chickens every year.

This has been true for ages. Why?

The answer is that free-range eggs aren't very profitable. Anyone who can make a buck from free-range eggs can make two bucks doing something else. If this weren't true, the farmers would be expanding their flocks as fast as they could.

Why isn't it profitable? Because consumers aren't willing to pay what it would cost. By my calculations, real grass-fed free-range eggs would need to retail for about $10 per dozen in city supermarkets for the farmers to earn a living equal to the U.S. median family income. Of this $10 per dozen, the farmer would receive about half, while wholesalers and retailers would get the other half. (That's how it always works.)

Out of the farmer's half, most goes to expenses -- feed, interest, depreciation, equipment, replacement chickens -- and only $1.69 per dozen goes to paying the farmer's wages.

(I'll post the assumptions and the calculations later, but in this post I want to cut to the chase.)

People can complain about factory farming as much as they like, but until they are willing to pay $10 a dozen for eggs, factory-farmed products are what they're gonna get. You've basically got your choice between factory farms that uses cages and ones that don't, and factory farms that are organically certified and ones that aren't.

If you buy 'em in the city, non-factory-farmed eggs are gonna cost you ten bucks. Activism will have no effect on this whatever. Farmers deserve to get paid, and so do the wholesalers and retailers. Real free-range eggs are expensive to raise. Nothing real will happen until enough people put their money where their mouth is. Ten bucks a dozen.