The Golden Yolk

We chat to two passionate egg farmers who are ensuring Australian standards of free-range and organic are met, because healthy, happy chooks means delicious, nutritious eggs.

- Kate Duncan

Have you ever cracked an egg and found a gooey double-yolk staring back at you? Rubbing your eyes in disbelief, did you question if you were dreaming? The chances of getting a double-yolk egg are about one in 1000, but what are your chances of cracking 11 doubleyolk eggs from the one carton? If your eggs come from happy hens like Tom and Fiona Fryar’s, the odds are surprisingly high.

“We had a lady ring up once to say, ‘We got 11 double-yolkers out of a dozen eggs — what happened to the other one?’” Tom laughs. The husband-and-wife team own Fryar’s Kangaroo Island Free Range Eggs, a poultry farm located on Kangaroo Island, South Australia. With the help of their sons Jason and Tom and wives Bonnie and Kirby, the Fryars sell about 180,000 eggs a week. That’s over 25,000 eggs per day which, you won’t believe, have been hand-collected from 64,000 hens!

Tom didn’t want to see himself still shearing at age 60, so in 1993 he and Fiona moved into egg production. “Back then, we had a lot to learn and no one to learn from. We started off with 400 chooks and, as we progressed, we thought, we can see a real future in this. So we bought 1000 hens and our first mobile shed,” Fryar says.

Now, they keep 64,000 hens across 5000 acres and are passionate about producing healthy free-range eggs. The Fryars’ farm has been certified by PROOF (Pasture Raised on Open Fields), an Australian free-range certification program. To meet PROOF’s standards, farmers must keep animals at stocking densities that will ensure access to forage and grazing. In the case of layer hens, like those at Fryar’s, they must not exceed 1500 hens per hectare. The Fryars have gone one better and run their hens at 700–750 per hectare, meaning they have loads of room to roam free.

HAPPY HENS