To order eggs or reserve meat, go to our online store
We maintain a flock of 50-100 ducks and 15-45 geese, depending on the season. Our ducks are Silver Appleyards, a heritage breed from England. They lay relatively well, make for a nice sized roasting bird, and at least we find them to be particularly beautiful.
We've mostly raised Toulouse geese, but added Embden ganders in 2023. We value them for their meat and their eggs, but a key function they play is duck guardian. They are huge and loud and spread their wings to look even bigger when anyone is circling overhead (including airplanes). Despite numerous hawk, eagle, and owl nests around the farm, all of whom seem interested in our flock, we've never lost a bird to an aerial predator.
The ducks and geese live together mostly peacefully, rotating through our wooded pasture, eating grass and mulberries in the early summer and persimmons in the fall, and our off-season vegetable fields, trampling down last fall's cover crops and gleaning rye heads and bits of resprouted kale, chicory, and other greens that managed to survive the winter.
Our Eggs
We sell duck and goose eggs in three different sizes:
- Duck eggs by the dozen are $10
- Duck eggs by the half dozen are $6
- Goose egg 4-packs are $12
These eggs are different from (or, as we would have it, superior to) chicken eggs in three ways:
- Flavor: waterfowl eggs contain a higher percentage of yolk, and a fattier yolk. This makes them taste like they've had a dollop of butter added right out of the shell.
- Texture: a lower water content means that a fried egg crisps up faster, and with help from that bigger yolk, leaves more of a soft center. Boiled and poached eggs are firmer, and they add more bulk to bread and cakes. (This also means that you've got to add some milk if you want them scrambled.)
- Nutrition:For the reasons above plus sheer size difference, a duck egg contains almost twice the calories of a chicken egg and a goose egg nearly four. Gram for gram, waterfowl eggs also contain 6x more B12 than a chicken egg!
Neither species is easy to convince to lay all year long: the duck egg season for us lasts from February until August or September, and the goose egg season just from March until June or July.
Our Meat
We sell whole duck and goose. Typically this is directly from the farm and processed by us right here for $8/lb. Birds can be preordered in our online store. In Connecticut an "arm's length transaction" like this is allowed but only direct to consumer -- no restaurants, grocery stores, etc. can buy our meat this way. We are fortunate to now have a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse about an hour away. For customers looking for a government stamp of approval on their bird, we can go this route, but the processing cost is extremely high, so we charge $10/lb for this additional service (and still make a lot less money as a result).