A FAMILY RUN FARM IN FOREST ROW, EAST SUSSEX
At Orchard Eggs we work together with nature to give you the best quality eggs you can find in the market. We practice Biodynamic Agriculture and strongly believe this makes the difference. By following its high welfare standards and providing a balanced natural environment, we go further than organic principles by treating our birds and the land with the utmost respect, ensuring you premium quality organic eggs.
At our farm we keep small flocks of chickens in moveable houses throughout 60 acres of biodynamic orchard. We rear them ourselves from day one, without the use of any antibiotics and feed them a 100% organic grain based diet which is locally sourced. It contains no artificial enhancers or GMO products.
Guided by the cockerels, our hens roam freely 24/7. This encourages them to express their natural behaviour and source their food whenever, wherever! This is also a great way to naturally fertilize the land, spreading valuable nutrients through their manure. This guarantees a productive orchard but more importantly, it creates a balanced and self-sufficient ecosystem. So when you try one of our eggs, you will EGGSperience the vitality of our land and support the truly organic ecosystem of Orchard Eggs. Enjoy!
OUR STORY
We are a young Dutch couple that moved to England in 2008 with the dream to start up our own flock of laying hens while settling down as a family. Since then we have welcomed two lovely girls and thousands of chickens into our lives!
We settled down at the Brambletye Fruit Farm in Forest Row where our friend Stein Leenders was establishing a biodynamic orchard with apples, pears and a variety of soft fruit. We knew Biodynamics was the best organic farming method to practice and we had been trained in it at the Warmonderhof College in Holland so we started working the land together with Stein; it has been a perfect match since the beginning. We started to cooperate between ourselves to create a self sufficient farm organism, with the orchard to feed and shelter our hens, and in return they would fertilize the soil and maximize the productivity of the orchard creating a balanced ecosystem.
We bought a small flock of laying hens and set up our moveable chicken houses in the orchard. Soon we started to supply our local market with great success and sooner then we expected we were running out of eggs and needed to expand the business! Since then, we have increased the number of birds and started rearing the chicks ourselves. This makes a huge difference allowing us to control their whole life cycle and ensure that their health and vitality is our priority.