Eileen Moriarty and Amanda Mutton label their free-range eggs Long Paddock, borrowing the phrase from drovers on stock routes and roadside verges which sustain animals in drought and en route to markets.
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Long Paddock chooks' mobile sheds move every second day. Their eggs fall onto conveyor belts each morning and are moved on to trays bound for outlets in Bungendore, Braidwood and Canberra.
After 80 weeks, when their Hyland brown chooks either stop laying or slow down, 16-week-old replacements arrive, and the old girls are either re-homed or end up on a restaurant's menu. "The fox is our friend," says Ms Moriarty, referring to her re-homed chooks which often replenish backyard flocks after deadly raid.
It's a light-hearted aside, unlike their annoyance at loose labelling which allows egg producers to claim free-range status while running up to 10,000 chooks per hectare.
Their flocks of 1500, which add up overall to about 5000 chooks on "Kongoola'', near Bungendore, and "Riverbourne'' on the Captains Flat Road, are grazed at 185 per hectare. They would like to see the standard for free-range reduced to 1500 chooks per hectare.
Ms Mutton says even at 185 per hectare, chooks tear up a paddock in a day. "Imagine what 10,000 do? There needs to be better guidelines. When we started out we were feeding scraps from restaurants to our chooks, a real no no, we've been subsequently told. Yet everyone in Canberra does it and it is a definite no no. So who is right and who is wrong? There must be clearer guidelines."
Along with business partners Valia Palmer and Jenny Moore the women began their venture two years ago, buying every available old caravan in the district and converting them with mesh floors and laying boxes. They have discarded the vans for sleek mobile sheds, the latest, a $75,000, solar-powered triumph of design. Canvas awnings adorn the exterior, a tank collects any rainwater and laying boxes open at 3am ahead of a laying frenzy before 8am.
Flick a switch and the eggs come down a conveyor belt and are packed off to market without a spot of chook poo on them. Dragged behind a tractor, the shed negotiates undulating terrain with hydraulic levellers keeping everything on an even keel, while chook manure begins to balance poor soil nutrients below.
A visiting vet found it remarkable the chooks were scattered to the four corners of their paddocks, which the farmers say is indicative of stress-free grazing. The chooks have dust baths, scratch through leaf litter among fallen timber and, in a trait from their predator-wary ancestors, flee for cover when screeching white cockatoos wheel overhead.
"You think you have it down pat with one flock and a new one comes and it is bit more flighty, or slower to get with the program; you are just learning all the time," Ms Moriarty said.
"Getting egg production going in the winter, being able to gentle them along and make sure the nutrition is right, all that has been a huge learning curve. The birds in the free-range systems [come from] birds bred over hundreds of generations for the cage system and all the data and statistics relating to those birds are all in the cage systems."
