At the end of the 1990's Mark's off-farm job was managing a farm nearby for a city based family. He became interested in running chooks in the olive grove that was part of that farm for meat rather than egg production.

Mark's skill as selling the idea to the farm's owners when they returned from a holiday was not as great as his enthusiasm was for the whole concept of running chooks outside as opposed to the factory farming way that is seen as normal these days.

Not to be defeated he decided to trial 50 egg laying hens on his own farm reasoning that egg layers would be more forgiving of management mistakes than meat birds as he still had his off-farm job. The idea was to learn what could go wrong on a small scale, then to move to the production of meat birds. So hastily, a hen house was constructed from an old caravan, a Maremma dog was purchased and installed in the farm-house chookyard awaiting the arrival of the 50 pullets.

This was in May, by August we were collecting 50 eggs a day and had run out of friends who needed eggs, so we started to sell them in our local town. Initially we delivered the eggs when Di went to Merriwa shopping, and then we came to an arrangement with our local IGA supermarket. We still sell our eggs at this supermarket, one of our best clients.

The demand for our eggs began there, people would take them as gifts to Sydney friends and so demand slowly emerged in Sydney as well. We finally realised that these were special eggs, and still haven't got around to doing the meat chicken thing – although we wish someone nearby would, there is just nothing like a real free-range chicken dinner.