Expect to find McIntyre Farms eggs at Treasure Valley markets soon

Two thousand egg-laying chickens arrived in early December at the McIntyre Farms between Lake Lowell and the Snake River.

The farm’s free-range eggs should be ready by mid-February for Treasure Valley stores and restaurants.

The McIntyre family had been producing about 10 dozen eggs a day from nearly 300 chickens since September 2016. Only limited distribution was possible until now at three locations and four drop points Boise, Meridian and at the farm.

A primary vendor during this beta testing phase has been Cliff’s Country Market in Caldwell.

“Customers say they are the best eggs they have ever eaten,” said Cliff Metcalf, owner of Cliff’s Country Market. “We were probably selling 25 to 30 dozen a week. That was all we could get from them. They sold the day they brought them in. I would say we would sell 80 to 100 dozen a week.”

McIntyre also supplies Waffle Me Up in Boise and, on a seasonal basis, The Fork in Boise and the Lakeview Fruit stand in Caldwell.

By February, McIntyre Farms anticipates producing 150 dozen eggs a day at peak production and an average of about 100 dozen a day as a newly state licensed commercial enterprise with graded eggs and bar-coded containers. Until now, the farm sold ungraded eggs in unmarked containers and, with less than 300 eggs, were not considered a commercial enterprise.

“We don’t know what our potential is,” said Brad McIntyre, who with his brother Ben and father Loren operate the 1,300–acre McIntyre Farms and McIntyre Pastures. “After the holidays, we’ll start hitting people up.”

“We have a good list of restaurants,” added Ben’s wife Maria McIntyre.

The McIntyres are also building a small roadside store at the farm on Lewis Lane to sell eggs, pasture pork and grass-fed beef.

Until now, the farm’s egg production was a manual affair. As a licensed enterprise, the family had to add an egg cleaner and candler to automate much of the process.

“The biggest thing is we’ll be profitable,” Brad McIntyre said. “We’ve lost money until now.”

At the same time, he anticipates the $5 a dozen store price to drop with the increased efficiencies with 2,000 chickens.

“I don’t know what the new price will be,” he said.

The chickens started to produce eggs sooner than expected after the farm acquired day-old chicks in spring 2016, Maria McIntyre recalled, and the McIntyres at first ended up giving many of them away.

“We decided we have to market what we’ve done,” she said. “Since we started doing that, we can’t keep them stocked. Then I said we should get a few more chickens. And they (the brothers) listened.”

These eggs come from chickens that are literally free range. The McIntyre family sets an 18-by-10 foot mobile trailer coop at a different spot each day and the chickens peck away at the grass. The chickens are not fenced in around the trailer and the farm is not fenced off from Lewis Lane. Yet the chickens stay close to the coop.

“It naturally won’t go more than 300 feet from where it roosts,” Brad McIntyre said. “The coop is its safety net. They stay close to home. A lot of people told us we were crazy not to have fences.”

The scale of this is now changing, but the chicken operation will remain mobile. In spring, the much larger flock will roost and lay eggs in two 50-by-20 mobile coops, dubbed “prairie schooners,” by the McIntyres. The three winter months have the chickens living in a greenhouse.

The chickens are part of a larger ecosystem on the McIntyre Farms that includes 780 acres of alfalfa for custom hay production, 160 acres of mint, 125 acres of corn, 125 acres of wheat, 180 acre of turnips, 40 cows, 28 steer, 20 heifers, 30 pigs and now 2,000 chickens.

“Our end goal is to preserve farm land and farm kids,” Brad McIntyre said. “We’re trying to raise kids that are excited to come back to ag.”

The chickens have a day job 

The chickens and cows serve the farm lands at McIntyre Farms, which engages in till-free farming, where the ground is not disturbed by tilling or plowing that causes soil erosion.

Cows, chickens and cover crops do the work instead of plows. Egg-laying chickens are better field workers than broilers and thus McIntyre Farms hatched the egg business.

“The eggs are the byproduct,” Brad McIntyre said.

Cover crops are grown in winter and the cows and chickens prepare the fields for the spring plantings. The crop roots stir up the soil and the cows then eat the cover crops and fertilize the soil. The chickens sanitize the pasture.

“With the cover crops comes biomass,” McIntyre said. “We use cattle to convert the biomass. The chickens get the parasites and worms, fly larvae and maggots. They are creating more manure, high-nutrient manure.”

And then they go into to the mobile coop and roost and lay eggs.

The McIntyre family, which has farmed this acreage since 1910, has been no-till farming for 10 years and for many of those years they considered adding chickens. They were finally inspired to implement the chicken plan after attending the No-till on the Plains conference in Wichita in 2014. They started with day-old chicks in spring 2016, Ben McIntyre said.