The Good Eggs Behind The Baker’s Duck

Before an egg reaches our kitchen, it has already had a more outdoorsy life than most of us.

The eggs we use at The Baker’s Duck come from The Good Dozen, a pasture-raised egg farm near Crows Nest, Queensland. Brooke, Trent and their family currently keep around 1,800 hens, along with three Maremma guardian dogs and at least one chicken important enough to have a name.

Once the eggs reach the bakery, they become much less visible. They disappear into custards and quiches, or are brushed over pastry before it goes into the oven.

We use them constantly, even when you would never know they were there.

So we followed the carton back to the farm.

YEP, 1,800 HENS IS A SMALL FLOCK

To anyone who does not work with chickens, 1,800 sounds like an almost unreasonable number of them. Within the egg industry, Brooke says, it is tiny.

“We’ve got about 1,800 hens at the moment and another flock coming soon,” she says. “That’s a few, but it’s still really small for our industry. Most egg-laying places would have hundreds of thousands of hens.”

FOUR HECTARES AND 800 HENS

One of the paddocks at The Good Dozen stretches across four hectares. Around 800 hens share that space between two mobile caravans.

The Good Dozen’s hens live in mobile caravans surrounded by pasture. Moving the caravans gives the flock access to fresh grass and plenty of room to forage, scratch and dust bathe.

The scale becomes more interesting when compared with Australia’s national free-range egg labelling standard.

Under the standard, eggs may be labelled free range when the hens have meaningful and regular access to an outdoor range during daylight hours, can roam and forage, and are kept at a stocking density of no more than 10,000 hens per hectare.

At the maximum permitted density, 40,000 hens could have access to a four-hectare outdoor range. The Good Dozen has around 800 in this paddock.

That comparison helps explain what Brooke means when she describes the farm as pasture raised.

“They’re out on grass all day in the sunshine,” she says. “They’ve always got fresh pasture. They get to forage and scratch and dust bathe and just do everything that a hen does naturally.”

A FARM BROOKE CAN BE PROUD OF

Brooke and Trent have been on the farm for around five years, although laying hens are a newer addition. Their first flock arrived in December 2025.

For Brooke, the way the hens are raised is part of a much broader idea about the food she wants to produce and the condition in which she wants to leave the land.

“I just really enjoy producing food that I can be really proud of and I know that people are happy to serve to their families,” she says. “I love doing something that is good by the animals and by our land and trying to regenerate our land.”

We go through a lot of eggs at The Baker’s Duck. Buying them from The Good Dozen means we know who raised the hens, how they live and what kind of farm our orders support.

It does not mean farm life is all sunshine and peaceful paddock wandering.

There is Penny, one hen lucky enough to have earned herself a name. Brooke also spends a surprising amount of time retrieving chickens from inside the tractor and on top of nest boxes.

Then there are the broken eggs.

“Egg white and yolk is just like the hardest thing to clean up,” Brooke laughs. “No matter what you do, it’s sticky and slimy and you pick it up and it just seems to teleport to another place.”

Some problems are apparently shared by farms and bakeries.

MARIO, LUIGI AND LOUIE

Keeping watch over the flock are Mario, Luigi and Louie, The Good Dozen’s three Maremma livestock guardian dogs.

Maremmas are raised alongside livestock from puppyhood, allowing them to bond with the animals they will eventually protect. At The Good Dozen, the dogs live as part of the flock and keep watch over the hens.

Mario and Luigi are brothers. Being an Italian breed, they naturally received Italian names.

Luigi, for the record, is apparently the boss.

Back at The Baker’s Duck, the eggs go back to disappearing into custards, enriched doughs, quiches, glossy pastry tops and more.

By the time they reach the cabinet, there is no sign of the four-hectare paddock, the mobile caravans, Penny or Luigi supervising proceedings. There is only the work the eggs came here to do.