Egg yolk color is totally a result of beta carotene content of the foods they eat. Our chickens' egg yolks will change in color dramatically at different times of the year with rainfall and the quality of the young grasses that are available or if I mix in carrot or high quality raw green powdered things into their food (I make them all sorts of things in my dehydrator from my human garden and organic green foods to support them when the native grasses aren't green or rich enough). The eggs you buy in the store can sometimes be even more orange because egg producers will supplement the chicken food with chemical forms of beta carotene just to make the yolk darker because people associate the darker color with a healthier egg. Even organic farmers will do this - supplement for color. That's because usually if the yolk is darker then it is an indicator that the chickens are getting out there to forage and get insects to eat. But when our yolks are paler the eggs are still amazing compared to any other egg I've tried raw. The beta-carotene also makes the yolksacs stronger so they can have a longer shelf life - but we often eat our eggs the same day so that's not an issue like it is for someone shipping their eggs and needing the yolks to look fresh longer even if they aren't. It's not only about the color - but what the color says about their diet on a whole. If our eggs have a little less beta-carotene in them we don't taste that difference.
It's a lot like how people think that brown eggs are more nutritious but the outside color means nothing. Why that association happened is because dual-purpose birds (ones used for eggs and meat) usually have brown eggs and those are the kinds of birds that backyard and small farmers used the most instead of the leghorns that made white eggs used by egg industry. (Leghorns have no meat on their bodies, they are egg-laying machines and can tolerate a lot of stress so are the ideal chicken to torture because they can withstand it - but it must be real torture because they are also really active high energy birds). The brown eggs always tasted better to people because those chickens were foraging. My leghorn eggs though are no different than my ISA brown eggs are going to be inside because they will get the same diet.
Toth - I'd love to have a full carcass out there for the chickens like you do - but I'm in suburbia! So for my meat feeding and maggot production I have to be a bit more innovative.
Raw paleo chicken eggs truly are of a different order aren't they?
I should add that I also make sure to give my laying hens their egg shells ground up back to them available in a bowl as well as ground oyster shells and when they are all laying I will go back to adding on their sprouts or in their meat the same powdered seaweed that I eat because besides protein the mineral requirements of producing eggs every day has got to be outrageous. I had to stop doing that for a while because if the pullets (female chickens before they start to lay) get too much mineral/calcium it could do them harm. Because of missing the supplements my laying hens aren't doing quite as well at the moment so yet another reason I can't wait until the pullets start laying. Nothing makes a chicken produce more than raw grass-fed whey though. That's kind of a miracle food for chickens. It's one of the downsides to us giving up dairy not having that for our chickens any more. When our chickens' get all their mineral supplementation their eggshells are almost as tough as regular duck egg shells. Sometimes they are almost hard to break open. That means that the insides of the eggs also have a high mineral content for us to eat. If there are more than enough minerals in the diet beyond what is necessary for shell-making and bare survival they have minerals to spare for putting into the food for their young in the yolk. A bet a starving chicken's yolk is mineral deficient.
The omega 3 vs 6 content of our eggs has also got to be dramatically different than any other eggs. I can eat our eggs every day and feel great. Not so with even the best eggs I can get elsewhere - even eggs from other backyard producers that allow their chickens to forage all day and feed them their table scraps.
Raw paleo chickens get raw paleo table scraps! They eat any raw dog food my dogs pass up, they get the meat that has gotten too high for our liking and they get only raw special treats! You should see the chickens with seafood - that is some manic intensity there. In summer they get little bits of fruit to cool them down too. They will eat watermelon when it's super hot outside - but not when it's cool enough. They are smart enough and fed well enough to refuse any food that is not ideal for them. My chickens are very picky eaters because I respect that they know what they need so they aren't starving and that is the way I've learned what a paleo chicken needs. They are a really quite instincto! They know instantly if something is good for them or not with no one having to teach them.
