People ask me this at the market almost every week, and I have come to think it is the only label question worth asking.
But before I answer it, you need to know what a laying hen actually is.
Seven times her own body weight
A mature red sex link hen weighs about five pounds. Over a laying year she will produce around 280 large eggs.
That is thirty-five pounds of egg. Seven times her body weight, every year.
There is no animal comparison for that. There is certainly no human one. And she does it while growing feathers, running an immune system, and pulling calcium out of her own skeleton to build shells.
She does it because we built her to. A hundred years of selection produced a bird that lays like this and cannot stop laying. She will strip her own body before she skips a day. A hen like this would not last a season in the wild.
That is not a scandal. It is one of the more useful things humanity has ever done. Cheap complete protein is why a lot of people eat at all, and the laying hen is the most efficient version of it we have ever managed.
But we made a bird that cannot feed herself. Which means feeding her is not a courtesy. It is the other half of a deal we entered on her behalf.
She eats to calories, not to protein
Here is the part almost nobody knows, and everything else follows from it.
A hen does not eat until her protein requirement is met. She eats until her energy requirement is met, and then she stops.
So every nutrient in that ration, every amino acid and vitamin and mineral, is riding on the fat and starch fraction being calibrated exactly right. Get the energy density wrong by a little and she fills up before she has taken in what she needs. She will not tell you. She will just keep laying and pull the difference out of her bones.
Which is why the number on a feed tag is a hypothesis, not a delivered dose. Seventeen percent protein describes what went into the mixer. It says nothing about what was digested by the bird.
And hens sort. They eat what they like and leave what they do not. I have watched them clean a trough down to a layer of split peas sitting in the bottom, and in that soy-free trial those peas were the protein. The tag was right. The hen just did not read it.
So we mill our own, and we use nine of them
Chick Starter. Grower. Broiler. Pullet Developer. 19% Layer. 17% Layer. 15% Layer. And two more for the heat: 21% Hot Weather and 19% Hot Weather.
Nine rations from hatch to retirement.
I will not publish the recipes. That is the part I actually own. But the count tells you the shape of it. A bird's requirements change constantly across her life, and the only way to meet them is to change what is in front of her when they do.
The old rule, and why summer breaks it
Old farmers told me protein only ever goes down. Start high with chicks, step it down as they mature, never raise it.
That is right until it is July in South Carolina.
She needs fewer calories to keep warm, and the heat suppresses her appetite on top of that. But she does not lay less. She is still building an egg a day, and she is still eating to calories, so a smaller volume of feed has to carry the same nutrition. The only way to do that is to concentrate it.
That is why the highest protein numbers on my list are the summer rations. It looks backwards on paper. It is the only thing that works in the field.
Nine rations, milled here, from hatch to retirement makes for healthier hens and better eggs. Order for Pickup on Thursday or Saturday, or have Farmer David deliver to you.
About soy-free
We ran the trial with organic, soy-free. The eggs got worse.
That is not an anecdote. It is the predicted outcome, and the people who formulate soy-free rations say so in print. Fertrell's own material explains it plainly: a soy-free ration carries a higher likelihood of amino acid deficiency, so it has to be balanced across multiple protein sources. Peas are high in lysine and low in methionine. Sesame meal is the reverse. You stack them and hope.
Protein synthesis is capped by whichever essential amino acid is shortest. Miss the stack and it does not matter what the crude protein number says. The shell, the albumen, the feathers, all of it gets throttled by the one thing that ran out.
Now look at what soy-free rations actually contain. Every one I have pulled includes fish meal, protein caught out of the ocean, replacing a legume grown across the road. And every one includes synthetic DL-methionine, because peas and grains cannot cover it. The soy-free ration is more complicated, not less.
The label names the absence. It never names the replacement.
And organic soy-free is the hardest version of all, because organic certification restricts synthetic amino acids. No soy, and limited ability to patch what soy was doing. That is the corner I walked into, and that is why I walked back out.
And the vegetarian thing
Same deficiency, different door.
Vegetarian-fed removes animal protein, the natural methionine source. Soy-free removes soybean meal, the best plant methionine source. Both roads end at a hen who does not digest enough protein, gets poor feathering, and starts pecking the bird next to her.
Stack vegetarian-fed, soy-free, and corn-free on one carton and you have removed the animal protein, the best plant protein, and the primary energy source.
Vegetarian fed, but not the three plants human civilization was actually built on. Why?
What about soy in the egg?
This is usually where somebody is really worried about an allergy, so here is the straight answer.
USDA researchers fed 99 layer hens standard soybean-meal-and-corn diets and then tested the eggs by two independent methods, immunoblotting and ELISA. Soy protein was undetected in every pooled sample, and the quantitative results classified all of them as not containing soy allergens. The hen digests it. It does not arrive in the egg.
One study cuts the other way and it belongs here. A 2021 Polish paper found a protein of about 13 kDa appearing in the yolk of eggs from soybean-fed hens, and suggested it may increase immunoreactivity for children allergic solely to soy. The authors call it preliminary. It is one small study against a larger one, but you should know it exists.
Genuine IgE-mediated soy allergy runs around 0.27 percent of the general population by oral food challenge, most of it in children, and roughly seventy percent of those children outgrow it by age ten.
And if your child actually reacts to something, that is an allergist's question, not a carton's. A man came up to my stand last year asking whether my eggs were soy-free. His son was reacting to something. I asked whether he had done a split yolk and white test, because egg allergy is typically a reaction to egg proteins, and the white and the yolk carry different ones. He had not. That test would tell him something. The carton would not.
Every year, better with less
That is what the labels are asking for. Take out the soy. Take out the corn. Take out the animal protein. Make the egg better by removing things.
None of it comes off the bird's requirement. We built a hen that produces seven times her weight in eggs a year and cannot survive without us. Then we started removing ingredients from her food to make a label read cleaner.
Tie one arm behind my back and I get worse eggs. Tie two and I get sick hens, more replacements, and dead birds, paid for by the animal on behalf of a customer's peace of mind.
It is the same answer as the washing argument. Everybody wants to debate the egg. Everything that matters happened in the bird before it was laid.
So what do my hens eat? Whatever it takes to keep them optimally healthy. They are the source. Let's not pretend we can have a perfect egg without a perfect hen.
