All food makes a journey from where it is grown or produced to your plate. Buying locally grown food means less food miles, which means less fuel used and pollution created to transport it.

Also, increasingly small family-owned farms use earth-friendly farming methods to raise healthy free range animals.

Such is the philosophy behind Nicole Feggans’ Jamberoo Valley Eggs.

Six years ago, she and husband Lachlan moved out of Sydney with their two children and bought 100 acres on the top of Jamberoo Mountain.

Following biodynamic principles taught by America’s most famous farmer Joel Salatin, Nicole now raises 1350 free-range chickens across three chicken tractors, plus Black Angus and Galloway beef, slow grown over three years to supply Moonacres Kitchen in Robertson or the Feather & Bone Butchery in Marrickville.

COVID saw Nicole pivot her egg business away from restaurants and hotels to a retail strategy.

She now sells them to IGA Gerringong, IGA Jamberoo and IGA Kiama Downs, the Top Shop in Kiama, The Pines Pantry in Kiama, at the Kiama Farmers Markets and to other shops on the South Coast and the Southern Highlands. 

“Now we’ve moved to retail it’s hard to go back,” says Nicole who has no background in farming, but her previous job in advertising for the Women’s Day and Women’s Weekly magazines means she has an excellent understanding of marketing.

Working in publishing was difficult with a young daughter, she says.

“At the end of the day I would leave at 5pm to pick her up from childcare and people in the office would look at me – ‘why is she leaving so early?’

“Here, I run the chickens, collect the eggs, do the marketing and do the daily deliveries. I wanted flexibility so that I could go to the kids’ school carnivals and be here for them.”

Nicole sources her Hyline Brown hens from a hatchery in Camden.

“He’s a vet and it’s a family run hatchery. We get them at 16 weeks and they only have to travel an hour to get here. We used to get them from Victoria but the poor birds were quite stressed when they arrived,” she says.

The Hyline Brown, often referred to as an ISA Brown, produces up to 300 eggs per year.  

“Laying is up and down all the time,” Nicole says.

“It does drop off in winter because the days are shorter. The longer the day the more eggs they lay each week.

“We keep them on the farm for 12 months and then move them on as house chickens. They still lay quite well, but not sufficient for an egg farm.”

When the chickens first arrive at the farm they are locked up in their caravan for a couple of days so that they know this is home.

“So, when we let them out, they know that when the sun sets, they all jump into the caravan onto the roosting bars. This protects them over night, because we do have foxes but our biggest issue is eagles.”

One of the chicken caravans

The birds are fed a special mix which accounts for 70 per cent of their feed and the rest is foraging.

“We don’t ever intend to sell to Sydney. We might look at one more caravan at some time, but there is so much work to do just in moving them regularly, their feed and their water (every day each chicken tractor and fenced area is moved).

“We are busy building up our herd because during the drought we had to sell off a lot of our cows as our spring fed dam went dry.

“We just want our property to be sustainably managed with the right amount of animals for 100 acres. The paddocks need a certain amount of recovery time once the animals have been through.”