Common Good Farm by Diane

Wednesday, August 22. Maggie from Maggie’s Café arranged a couple farm tours for us as we made our way to our Lincoln, Nebraska, potluck at her restaurant. The first was at Common Good Farm in Raymond, NE. Common Good is the only certified biodynamic farm in Nebraska and is situated on 21 acres of land. It runs a CSA with 51 shares, and has 5 pigs, 11 cows, and 550 plus laying hens.

If you’re wondering what biodynamic is, it’s a way of raising crops and livestock that works with whole systems, not with just parts. Biodynamic farmers look at the life energy of the planet, with how the earth and soil and everything around is alive. I’m not sure if that’s a succinct enough definition, so you might want to check out Sustainable Table’s dictionary at www.sustainabletable.org/dictionary for what’s probably a better definition. (You can also find the definition for CSA or community supported agriculture there also.)

For me, the highlight of Common Good Farm was their chickens. They’re raised on pasture, where they root and peck as chickens are meant to do. They also eat the grasshoppers that tend to be a problem in that area. They live in portable chicken coops, so they have a place to lay eggs and hang out, but they also have fresh pasture to run around in and forage from. We were actually able to walk into the hen house (a first for me!) in order to take an egg out from under the chicken. Unfortunately (or fortunately!), the chickens all scattered when we got there, but we were able to see the eggs in the nest and actually hold them.

It didn’t take too long before a rooster jumped into the hen house to check us out. Shortly after, a few hens came back in, along with another rooster. We were told that roosters look after certain hens and that there is literally a pecking order in the flocks. (That’s where the term ‘pecking order’ came from.) In a flock, one hen can peck all the others, and the weakest hen is pecked by all others. In addition, each flock has one main rooster. If that rooster should die, there will be a competition among roosters to take over the top spot. Roosters not only look after the hens, they also look out for predators, such as owls and possums.

While standing in the henhouse, I asked if roosters would ever attack, and Evrett said, ‘not usually’. When someone says to me ‘not usually’, that’s makes me think that it happens sometimes, and I certainly didn’t want to find out what the two roosters staring and me and crowing forcefully were about to do. I gingerly left the henhouse and left the eggs for the hens that had started to come back through their chicken door.


We also learned that chickens lay one egg or less a day, averaging 6-7 eggs a week. They molt once a year, which means that once a year they lose their feathers and don’t lay eggs. Each time a hen molts, they lay less eggs, but their eggs are bigger. After the first molt, they go from 6-7 eggs a week to 5-6 eggs a week.

The other really interesting tidbit we learned was that before the hens start laying eggs, their feet are a deep rich yellow. But once they start, their legs lose the deep yellow color because whatever it is that makes their legs that color is used to make the yolks the deep yellow (that good eggs have).

If you ever wonder what the difference between a pasture raised and confined egg is, just crack one of each side by side. The pastured egg will be a much deeper yellow.

We had a great time at Common Good Farm, and are very thankful to the farmers Ruth and Evrett for letting us spend some time with them.

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