In-Season: Tender Herbs
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In Fine Feather
John Brunnquell knows farms. He grew up on one in Wisconsin and took over the egg side of the business after returning from college, where he majored in agronomy (the study of agriculture). The farm he was raised on kept chickens in cages, the industry standard since the 1960s. But when he stepped into his first cage-free chicken barn in the early ’90s, he began to question the industry’s status quo.
“That kind of shattered everything I thought I knew,” he says. “So then you ask yourself: Well, that premise of what you thought was wrong, what else do you think is wrong?”
So he started researching. The egg industry of the early ’90s was polarized between pro-cage groups on one end and completely anti–animal agriculture groups (like PETA) on the other.
“Intuitively I thought the answers are probably somewhere in the middle,” Brunnquell says.
Brunnquell and his team began making step by step improvements to chickens’ welfare based on their observations and the small amount of scientific data available. As they improved the chickens’ environment, they saw the number of eggs laid increase. This process resulted in the 1999 founding of Egg Innovations, a business headquartered in Warsaw, Indiana. It is now the United States’ largest exclusive producer of 100% free-range and pasture-raised eggs. Many of their first partner farmers were part of north central Indiana’s large Amish community.
“We started out with a focus on our farmers, that this truly should be a partnership,” Brunnquell says. “… That's a nice phrase, but what does that mean? They need to make a living wage. You’ve got to treat them like a professional. And equally you have to have expectations.”
Today Egg Innovations partners with over 50 farms from Wisconsin to Kentucky and has two commercial brands, Blue Sky Family Farms and Helpful Hens. The latter, founded in 2021, sources all of its eggs from regenerative farms. Brunnquell says he is passionate about regenerative agriculture, the practice of rebuilding soil health to sequester more carbon from the atmosphere while growing abundant crops.
“It's real, it can be transformative, when you understand carbon sequestration, and you understand soil health and that we’ve been mining the soil for decades,” he says. “And here's a way that you can still actively engage in cropping but you can rebuild the soil, and in rebuilding the soil you sequester carbon. It just became a very natural extension of what we do.”
Brunnquell hopes he has planted a seed in the industry that shows valuing welfare and sustainability can also be profitable. He says Helpful Hens is the fastest growing premium egg brand in the country, and 2022 saw record sales for both the company’s brands. According to the USDA, 40% of eggs come from cage-free hens, an improvement compared to less than 5% in 2008. But cage free does not necessarily mean the hens are given space to roam outside and graze on pasture, like the hens at Egg Innovation’s farms
He shares an anecdote about meeting a Kentucky grain farmer who had begun farming his grain regeneratively but was unsure he could find people willing to pay more for his more sustainable product. After learning that Egg Innovations would soon start to source 100% regenerative products for their supplemental chicken feed, he felt validated that there are producers out there who care about sustainable agriculture practices enough to pay for it.
“That's kind of the neat thing with what we do,” Brunnquell says. “When you get those right conversations of like-minded people, then you can begin solving issues.”
To learn more about Egg Innovations, visit their website at egginnovations.com/
Gwynneth Hurley works as a freelance editor, writer and nanny in South Bend, Indiana. She graduated from Indiana University in 2019 with degrees in cognitive science and journalism.
She loves to explore and learn about the world through a holistic perspective. She can be
reached at gwynnethhurley@gmail.com.
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