Roosted on the stoop of their honor-code farm stand, Julie and Timothy Lancaster described how they accidentally became one of Ouray County’s largest commercially licensed egg farms.

It all began with a friend’s divorce.

The Lancasters received five hens and a rooster as the spoils of that split in the spring of 2022. The friend no longer had room for the birds and thought the couple could use chickens to fill some space on their 38-acre property off the east side of U.S. Highway 550, across from the Basecamp 550 campground.

The couple bought the parcel in 2021 after inheriting a nest egg from a family member that wasn’t enough to buy a house but sufficient to buy the land and put up a yurt where they live.

They never planned to use the acreage for farming, and only casually considered having chickens. Both moved to the area from Denver in 2019 and now work for the city of Ouray. Julie is an accounting specialist and Timothy is a city parks maintenance operator.

It’s a little bit of a chicken or egg question as far as how Lancaster Family Farms LLC came to be. The couple’s penchant for bringing home new batches of birds simultaneously served to meet the increased consumer demand they were seeing.

They learned quickly how many locals love access to farm-fresh eggs as much as they do — Julie loves preparing hers with cream cheese, like her dad taught her.

And it helped when they learned their flock meant the property was taxed as farmland, rather than vacant property.

So this year, as bird flu brings store-bought egg prices in line with farm-fresh prices, the avian outbreak means the Lancasters are approaching their busiest season yet as one of the county’s biggest egg producers.

And they’re not chickening out, planning to keep an eye on their chickens and follow state protocols if the flock becomes infected.

They’re more focused on increasing production while keeping prices low for their consumer base. At $6 a dozen, it’s a steal.

“What I’m seeing is that we have so many transplants from different places and such and they’re used to being able to get their farm fresh stuff,” Timothy said.

And in general, more people are asking where their goods are coming from, he said.

Founding the farm

Lancaster Family Farm eggs come from a spice-blend colored flock of around 100 hens that roam a rocky acre spotted with pinyon pines and Eastern red cedars. The fencing around their domain is more of a suggestion, Julie said. Sometimes she’ll find eggs under their porch or in the trees. Their dogs, Ranger, Sirius and Snitch, help keep away wild birds and predators.

The Lancasters decided they’ll cap their flock to as many as can fit in their coop: a carport they purchased, reinforced and insulated.

On top of the chicken’s roomy estate, the birds have a pretty gourmet diet. Timothy built foraging beds filled with wild peas, rye and sweetgrass to supplement the feed, fresh food scraps and worms they can eat.

When gifted their first hens, Julie learned quickly that even in the best summertime conditions with long hours of daylight, each hen could only lay one egg per day. That meant it took them about a week and a half to collect a dozen for themselves. So in batches, they bought more and then some more. There’s two outgrown coops around the property. Timothy found most of their chickens in Montrose from scouring Craigslist and online marketplaces for deals.

They have classic white Leghorns, some backyard varieties, and some black French hens with coiffed head feathers that Julie named Eleanor and Marie Antoinette.

Julie’s pretty sure one of them doesn’t lay eggs, but it’s hard to pluck out the freeloaders, she said.

At this point neither of them are quite sure exactly how many hens they have or many households they have as customers. Both are somewhere in the ballpark of 100. Now that they have a self-serve farmstand set up, it’s also harder to keep track of who is buying their eggs. But their capacity is about to grow this year again as they’ve ordered 30 new pullets, or teenage chickens, to meet the increased demand they’ve seen in anticipation of spring laying season.

Egg sales

Come April, fresh cartons of eggs arranged in a green, brown and white checkerboard pattern will sit stacked in the fridge of the Lancasters’ honor-code farm stand: a repurposed caramel tool shed just about 100 yards up Winding Trail across from Basecamp 550.

If all goes well, they should have about 700 eggs a week.

As the Lancasters sat outside the farm stand explaining their business model, their first commercial customer and neighbor drove by: Tom Edder, who owns Maggie’s Kitchen in Ouray with his wife, Kris.

They’ve charged $6 for a dozen since they started selling eggs three years ago. In 2023 they applied for a commercial license which allows them to sell their eggs to restaurants. For businesses like Maggie’s that buy in bulk during the summertime, the Lancasters offer a $5 per dozen deal.

Even in the face of rising prices, Julie said she sees no reason to change that.

She checked their 2024 books and found the price of feed only increased 7 cents per 100 pounds over the year, so she couldn’t justify raising prices like grocery stores have.

Patrons can pick up their eggs at the farm stand and pay via Venmo or cash.

They have a camera in the case of freeloading customers, but they haven’t had any problems so far.

Before they sold to local businesses, their first loyal customers were their neighbors at the Valley Heights mobile home park.

“Everybody in the trailer park takes care of us anyways, because we care of them,” Timothy said.

The Lancasters own the road leading into the trailer park and help maintain it when it washes out during heavy rain.

Timothy also raises and butchers farm-fresh meat chickens with his father each summer, but he’s decided to scale back on that side of the business now that he works full time. He once wanted to sell meat chickens commercially after fielding requests from local restaurants — which would make him the only farm-raised chicken producer on the Western Slope — but he decided against investing in a permanent butcher kitchen.

He’s not sure yet how many meat chickens he wants to farm and sell this summer but he knows the increasing calls and inquiries about farm-fresh eggs and meat demonstrates he and his wife are filling a rising demand. And as long as the desire is there, they’ll continue trying to meet it.

“Every time we think we have enough, more demand happens,” Timothy said.

Lia Salvatierra is a journalist with Report for America, a service program that helps boost underserved areas with more reporting resources.