How do you get orange yolks?

[Gray Farms]

The eggs are yellow because they are eating more feed than forage. It's dark, leafy greens like spinach, kale, chard, cabbage, and most common and abundant green - GRASS, that give eggs that bright orange coloring. Instead of letting them fill up on feed first thing in the morning, try tossing some feed out in the area just outside their run. This will encourage them to start working for their food.

My birds don't go outside at all. So it must be in my feed.

 

[Rock Home Isle]

My girls have suddenly exploded with eggs!! But I noticed they are the store bought looking yellow color? They free range on 1/2 an acre from 6am to dark when I close the coop door. They have access to organic layer feed, and all the bugs/grass they could want. So...why are they yellow?

If the chickens have access to grass, the yolks should be a dark yellow, fresh greens make the best eggs.

In winter I'll add safflower seed to the diet to boost omega-3 in the eggs and maintain a darker yellow yolk, never as dark and wonderful as the eggs from the summer grass fed birds...but never that pasty yellow of the store bought eggs.

If you want dark dark yellow-orange yolks, marigolds will do it.

 

[Thebernards]

I live in CA and my grass isn't that green because of drought restrictions. But it is green!! Could that be it? I added some cracked corn to their diet and started letting them out and then feeding them (they run out of their pen the second the door opens.) How long until I see a difference in their yolk??

 

[Gray Farms]

7-10 days

 

[Rock Home Isle]

My wife buys these big plastic boxes of spinach for salads. Inevitably it will start to go bad before we eat it all, I give all this to the chickens. I know during winter it makes a difference.

In fact, dinner leftovers...all the stuff that we normally compost, I now toss to the chickens. It's a different kind of recycling I guess...