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rick-leibeeMy guest today is Rick Leibee, Sales and Marketing Manager for Nature’s Yoke, a specialty brand of Westfield Egg Farm, Inc. We’re going to learn all about how organic, free range, and other specialty eggs are produced, how they are labeled, and why you should eat them. This is the brand of eggs I eat every morning. Rick grew up on a small family farm in rural Kentucky where they raised a lot of their food and had livestock for family use. He is still married to his college sweetheart for 39 years, Helen, and they have 11 children—six birth and 5 adopted, four are international adoptions. He lives in New Holland, PA home to Nature’s Yoke. When they were first married in 1976, Rick and his wife adopted the “healthy” eating lifestyle. They received, for a wedding present the cookbook Laurel’s Kitchen, which had just been published, and since then have eaten as “clean” and organic as possible with a large family. They lived on 15 acres and grew their own food and raised free range chickens and cattle for our personal use. Rick graduated from Florida State University in 1977 with a degree in business with an emphasis and marketing. While working for other businesses, Rick became friends with the owner of Westfield Egg Farm and was invited to work there. www.naturesyoke.com

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Organic Cage-free and Other Exceptional Eggs

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Rick Leibee

Date of Broadcast: July 28, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It is Tuesday, July 28, 2015. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. We’ve been having so much rain. It looks like it’s going to rain again, but I think we’ll be safe.

I used to live way out in the country in California. So when we had rain, we lost our power. And so, every time it rains or we have thunderstorms, I think, “Are we going to lose power right in the middle of the show?” But that’s never happened. So I think we’re fine.

Today, we’re going to talk about food, one of my favorite subjects. And specifically, we’re going to talk about eggs. I eat eggs every morning. I eat organic eggs every morning. And so, I thought I would call up the maker of the eggs that I eat and see if they would come talk about their eggs. And they said yes.

So my guest today is Rick – I asked him how to say this. And I didn’t check before the show. I think it’s Leibee, but we’ll find out once he comes on.

Rick Leibee, he’s the sales and marketing manager for Nature’s Yoke. And that’s a specialty brand of Westfield Egg Farm. They’re in Pennsylvania. I just found out that he’s right down the road from the studio that does the production for this show.

Hi, Rick.

RICK LEIBEE: Hi, Debra.

DEBRA: So even after I asked you, how do you pronounce your name?

RICK LEIBEE: That’s okay. It’s one of those names with the spelling. But it’s just pronounced Leibee.

DEBRA: You know what? I get this with my name too. People look at my name, D-A-D-D, and they go – it’s too simple. It doesn’t even occur to them that it’s just Dadd like what you call your father.
So Leibee, I’m writing this down.

Hello! So, tell us how did you become interested in working for an egg farm?

RICK LEIBEE: Well, I guess a couple of things. Most my adult life, at least since I’ve been married, I’ve been interested in eating healthy, organic food. I grew up on a farm myself and since lived on a small farm of about 15 acres, raising my own chickens and cattle and sheep and various other animals for myself and my family.

One thing led to another. I actually became friends with the owner of this company, Westfield Egg Farm, probably about 10 or 15 years ago. And over time, our friendship developed, he asked me to come to work here because I had a background in marketing, which they needed some help in. And I guess you can say my lifestyle and my work came together.

DEBRA: I think that’s really wonderful. So tell us something about the business. How long has Westfield – or I guess, Nature’s Yoke is the brand. I want to know about egg farming today. I just don’t know anything about it. I’ve raised chickens in my backyard, so I’ve seen the egg come out of the chicken and I know what I was feeding it. But I really don’t know much about what happens in a commercial setting.

RICK LEIBEE: Well, this particular company, Westfield Egg Farm, was started back in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s by the Weaver family. At that time, they were typical egg farmers. They did it on the side, along with their dairy farm.

And that’s why even today, when you go to eggs, to buy eggs at a grocery store, the department you go to is the dairy department because that was the history of it all.

But today, most eggs, probably 94% of all eggs that are produced in America are still in the classic battery-caged environment where there are two or three chickens in a small, wired cage, in a large house with hundreds of thousands of chickens. It’s very efficient from an agricultural business standpoint. And that is your classic egg facility.

But about 25 or 30 years ago, in addition to small, little independent farmers, some people thought, “Hey, maybe we can produce eggs to sell in the grocery store that isn’t out of a typical caged environment.”And Westfield Egg Farm is one of those companies.

So about 21, 22 years ago, they started doing different kinds of specialty eggs, became certified organic in the early ‘90s and have just prospered since then with all of their farms being cage-free. We now also have a number of the farms that are free range of pasture-raised organic. You mentioned they are some of the ones that you like to eat.

It takes a lot more time and a lot more effort to have those kinds of farms than the typical eggs that are produced, the typical grocery store eggs. But we have a lot of great customers and they’ve been very loyal with us. So it’s been a lot of fun to continue to push that kind of product with research and new farms that we keep adding every year.

A lot of people like that lifestyle of raising those kinds of eggs too. All of our farms are family farms. None of them are corporate farms. In other words, we’re Westfield Egg Farm, but we have about 85 independent, small farmers that supply the eggs. We just go out and pick them up, bring them back to our facility and grade them, wash them according their organic and USDA standards and put them in the cartons that you get at your store wherever you shop down there in Florida. But they might come from 1 of 85 different small family farms that we deal with.

DEBRA: And each of those are owned independently. You pick up their eggs. And instead of it being a corporate, industrial kind of thing, it’s eggs that it’s used to be.

RICK LEIBEE: Exactly, yes. And that model is working really well for us. And there are other companies that have a similar model. But for us, it works really, really well because it also ties into sustainable agriculture because it’s a lot easier to sustain that kind of small family farm than these huge, multiple, layered agricultural, industrial complexes.

DEBRA: I think all foods should be produced this way. It’s just the word industrial and food just don’t fit together in my brain.

RICK LEIBEE: Yes, it’s tough and yet, there needs to be a lot of food produced. So it’s one of those difficult things to get our head around, what’s the right thing to do and all of those things because a lot of people need to be fed. And yet, some of the practices are maybe not what you want to get our eggs from anyway.

DEBRA: So what was it that inspired Westfield Egg Farm to go organic and cage-free and pasture? A lot of people aren’t doing this. What happened that your company decided to do that?

RICK LEIBEE: The family, the Weaver family that owns the company, has always been a very innovative family and always interested in trying new things. And even before they were organic, they were trying to figure out nutritionally what they could do to decrease some of the cholesterol, some of the fats and increase the good vitamins in the eggs. They tried different things.

Through the years, some of them worked really well, but they began to see that if they wanted to continue down that path, they would probably need to give up the traditional approach to the egg business. One of those steps was to get the farms certified organic and feed them organic grain. And for them, I think it was just a natural evolution of their view of agriculture.

Again, family farms, healthy. They have a simple belief. Healthy chickens, healthy eggs. So it sprung out of all of those ideas that they had.

DEBRA: Good! Well, we need to go to break in a few seconds, but what I want to do when we come is to start talking about the different types of eggs. I know that there are different names for them and different ways of doing things.

I just want to give our listeners an idea of what kind of eggs are available that they might not be finding at their supermarket, but would find at their natural food store and what those differences are in the eggs, why you would choose one over the other. There are a lot of choices in eggs. So we’re going to talk more about that when we come back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Rick Leibee, sales and marketing manager for Nature’s Yoke, a specialty brand of Westfield Egg Farm. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Rick Leibee. He’s the sales and marketing manager for Nature’s Yoke. They have all kinds of eggs. We’re going to talk about them now, find out what they are.

So you have a really good website. It’s NaturesYoke.com, and that’s Y-O-K-E, lia ke yoke around an ox, rather than Y-O-L-K, like the yolk in an egg. NaturesYoke.com.

So you have different kinds of eggs that you offer. So let’s start with the first one you have on your list, which is simply called organic eggs. Tell us about what makes those organic.

RICK LEIBEE: Okay, sure. As most consumers over the last 10 years have become more and more aware of eating healthy (which is a great trend, organic is a term, I think, most people are becoming more familiar with), for us in the food industry, what it means is that most every state and certainly, nationally, there is a USDA organic certification or standard. And again, most states either meet or exceed that standard.

So for our farms, which are all here in Pennsylvania, we get certified by the Pennsylvania Organic Board as well as the USDA. And then that allows us to, again, have that certification on there. What it means is they come out and actually test the farm to make sure that the ground itself is organic, meaning no chemicals or additives that are not 100% organic are allowed on the property, as well as the food, the grains, and the food that the chickens eat itself was raised on a farm that is subject to the same tests.

Usually, it’s a minimum of three years. Usually, somewhere between three and five years for most states that the ground has to be proved to not have had any harmful chemicals or additives put on it other than natural compounds.

So that’s some of the basic things. And then, there are other things like even down to the cleaning solutions we use here in the plant. The eggs come in, they’re washed. We have to make sure we wash them properly in an organic solution as opposed to a harmful chemical solution.

So even at that level, when the consumer gets the product, everything that’s had to do with it is part of that organic process, you could say, until it actually arrives in their grocery cart and to their house.

DEBRA: That’s really good. So your organic food product is certified organic from beginning to end.

RICK LEIBEE: That’s correct. And then those hens that are on our organic farms are (part of our definition is), our minimum standard for all of our hens is that they live in what’s called a cage-free environment, meaning, just picture a big, old barn, maybe your granddad owned in the country. This huge, big barn but now, it’s totally open. There are no cages. There are no stalls. It’s just this big, open building. There’s some roost that poots. The chickens actually like to fly a little bit if you give them room.

And then on the outer edges, there would be little boxes that they can hop up or fly up to and lay the eggs, They’re rolled at the back and then they’re collected on the outer edge by the families. And all of our organic, cage-free barns also have doors, usually one on each wall, sometimes more and they have unlimited outdoor access because part of the definition of organic, at least in Pennsylvania here, is there must be at least some outdoor access.

So they can go outside, get a little sunshine, scratch around or whatever. It’s not pasture-raised or free range. It’s just, again, picture your grandma’s chicken coop and the chicken could go outside and scratch around some. But it’s not like they had to run up the whole property. It’s just a contained area. But it’s a great environment. They enjoy it.
We have a number of our small family farmers choose that type of facility to manage on their property.

DEBRA: Okay, good. You said some other words that are often associated with eggs. So let’s just discuss for a minute cage-free, pastured and free-range. So what do those mean?

RICK LEIBEE: That’s a great question. Here’s the difficult part. There is no regulated, standard definition for those words in the food industry except for organic, which, again, as we said earlier, a certified from an outside source either the USDA, again, or Pennsylvania. The rest of the terms are just terms that have evolved over the last 10 to 20 years in the industry. So I can give you our definitions. Again, every company has maybe a slightly different version.

So what I’m going to tell you is generally correct for most people. But again, each company would have their specifics.

For us, we have, what we call our entry-level egg, you might say, into the special egg business. That would be just the cage-free egg. We have those in cage-free brown or cage-free white.

And cage-free, as I’ve described a moment ago, picture this big, open barn, no cages, no stalls as I’ve described earlier. But instead of being organic, they are fed – again, this is not a regulated term, what we call an all-natural grain meaning that there are no antibiotics, no animal by-products, no hormones, no steroids, no chemical additives.

It’s just the grains and usually, a little bit of oyster shell and calcium for them to be able to produce good eggshells.

But it’s all, again, not regulated term, natural ingredients, but again, not organic.

That’s our what we call our entry-level egg because again, not everybody’s budget allows maybe everything they’d like to do. And these eggs because they’re not certified organic, but they still have a lot of great advantages, a lot of people can afford them more easily than an organic egg. So that’s what we call our entry-level specialty eggs, cage-free.

DEBRA: We’re going to need to go to break very soon here. But I want to ask you, if somebody is just buying regular, supermarket egg, what are those eggs being fed? What are those chickens being fed?

RICK LEIBEE: The difference between theirs and ours is they’re being fed grains and everything, but they often put in a lot of additives, hormones, steroids, antibiotics, things like that, which are just, again, added chemicals to try to get them to produce more and better eggs. But are those chemicals better for you as they’re passed on through the chickens? That’s the issue people have to deal with.

DEBRA: So we will go to break, but when we come back, we’re going to talk more about different things to look for when you’re choosing an egg.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Rick Leibee from Nature’s Yoke. Their website is NaturesYoke.com, Y-O-K-E, Nature’s Yoke. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Rick Leibee from Nature’s Yoke. Actually, that’s the brand that we’re talking about today because that’s what I eat. That’s what I get at my natural food store. We’re going to talk about the exact eggs that I eat in just a second.

I do want to mention that – Rick, I don’t know if you know about what happened last week in the United States government about the right to know law with GMO labeling.

RICK LEIBEE: Yes, I did read a little bit about that. I don’t pretend to be an expert about it, but it seems like something did happen there.

DEBRA: Well, to honor that occasion, what happened is – listeners, if you’re not familiar what this is (and I’m not an expert in it either), basically, people who are concerned about GMO labeling, which I am, and I see no reason for people who are putting GMO ingredients into food products should not have to label them.

In Europe, they’re required to label them. But for me, I just want to stand on my soapbox for a minute because labeling is a big issue for me as a consumer advocate for 30 years. The only way that I can make a decision about how toxic a product is or not is to have information on the label or information on a website.

The fact that so many products are not completely labeled well enough is something that I’m always speaking up for.

I would love to have standardized terms for our eggs and everything else, which doesn’t exist.

And so, the point I want to make here is we were talking before the break about how if you were to buy an egg that’s not a specialty egg like what we’re talking about today, you just buy it at the supermarket as part of the industrial system, that you’re going to get grains and whatever and you’re also going to get additives and by-products and all kinds of things that are being fed to that chicken and then getting into your body through the egg.

And so, I think what that carton should say is grains, this toxic additive, that toxic additive. It should all be there on the carton, and it isn’t. And the way things are now is that they just get to say eggs. And if you want to know organic eggs, it has to say organic blah-blah-blah. And the ones that actually have the toxic stuff in it aren’t required to be labeled. That’s all I want to say on that.

RICK LEIBEE: Like you said, that was your soapbox. I don’t disagree. I have to admit, I read labels too. I’m a consumer. We’re in the food business, but when I go to the grocery store, I read labels. So I think it is a good thing. If somebody is afraid of it, then that’s a whole other issue.

DEBRA: I think if the full information is not disclosed about a product, then consumers can’t make a choice, can’t make an informed choice and we do have a right to know. We do have that right. We have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To me, having a life, having health, requires that we know what’s in our products. But you’ve done a good job with that.

So let’s talk about pastured eggs because that’s what I eat. I eat pastured eggs. And when I saw that word, ‘pastured’, I just immediately fell in love with your brand. So tell is what pastured eggs are.

RICK LEIBEE: For us, we saw a lot of terms out there. People were using free-range and grass-fed. And those are good terms. But we settled on the term pasture-raised because the idea there is, if you’ve bought our product, you’ve seen the carton, there’s actually a picture of our chickens, our hens, on what you’d picture when you picture a pasture, just this wide open field. That is what our farms look like. It’s not Photoshopped. That’s really one of our farms, really our hens.

We thought that picture would be clearer to people that that is our goal for this type of egg is to get the chickens in an open environment where they can eat grass and bugs, have sunshine and fresh air and move around and exercise even more and all those wonderful things.

So simply, the hens are out in a pasture. Again, they have a big barn that we leave wide open that they can run in and out of when they want to run back or if it starts to rain. And again, we don’t put them outside if the weather there’s lightning or some other difficult situation. But whenever they can go outside, they’re outside. And they love it.

DEBRA: So it sounds like pastured, free-range and grass-fed are all different terms for pretty much the same thing?

RICK LEIBEE: It’s an evolving thing. I think pasture-raised, the way we define it is the most open. Free-range is beginning to be better defined although it’s not all the way defined because there are certain groups –

For example, there’s a group in Virginia called Certified Humane that goes around and does some independent studies. And they come up with a definition of free-range, which more and more people (not everyone) are trying to adopt (again, it’s not regulated) where it’s not maybe as much grass as pasture-raised, but at least in an area maybe 60, 70, 80 feet (and this can vary again tremendously) outside of the barn, there would be an area, a fenced-in area that the hens could go out.

It’s not, what you and I might think of a free open range. And that’s why we didn’t like that term because it’s beginning to mean a smaller area than a true open area. But it’s still a great environment and it’s a very good situation for the hens. Again, maybe companies are using that term and beginning to try to define it like that.

DEBRA: So then what would grass-fed mean?

RICK LEIBEE: Well, grass-fed is one of those terms that’s true and not true because chickens do eat grass, but they cannot consume much more than about 15% of their diet with grass because they do need the grain to have the energy to produce the eggs and to have the shells come out right and all those kinds of things.

And so grass-fed just basically means they are getting outside on some grass, at least a part of the day, maybe they’re free-range, maybe they’re pasture-raised like us.

Some people use grass-fed just to mean there’s just a really small, little area or even some farms just bring in a little bit of fresh green hay. They don’t really go outside, but they are getting, what you could say, some greens into their diet.

Because again, a little bit of greens is good. But again, they can only eat so much of that and still be able to be healthy and produce like they need to do.

DEBRA: Again, we need to go to break. But I just want to ask you quickly. If it’s a grass-fed beef, that’s a different situation because you’re not making eggs.

RICK LEIBEE: Grass-fed beef would be more what you might think of pasture-raised outside and not eating a lot of grain, but are outside most of the time, correct.

DEBRA: Okay, good. We’re going to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Rick Leibee from Nature’s Yoke. That’s Nature’s Yoke, Y-O-K-E, dot com. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Rick Leibee from – the brand is Nature’s Yoke.

Let’s continue on with all these different types of eggs because this is really interesting to me. I do want to point out that you have on here organic, pasture-raised eggs versus pasture-raised eggs. So I would assume that that means that you can get organic, pasture or not organic pasture.

RICK LEIBEE: Exactly right. Just like the difference between our cage-free brown eggs or organic eggs, the farms are basically the same. The difference is one is on an organic farm with organic grains whereas the other is, again, what we use the term are natural grain.

The same goes with pasture-raised. The pasture-raised farm has all the benefits of organic, pasture-raised, but the farm is not certified organic or the grain is not certified organic.

Again, our standards for that pasture farm is the farm cannot use on the property any chemicals or additives. And what grain they do eat, again, has to be free of all antibiotics, steroids, hormones, all those kinds of terrible chemical additives. But it does not have to be certified.

And the main reason for that is, again, there is a significant price increase if you go to organic because of getting the certification, buying those grains. And some customers who love the pasture-raised – and they’re happy that it’s not organic because they’re going to pay $1 or $1.50 less, or whatever it is, at their local store, compared to the organic.

And then we have an equal number. We sell almost 50/50 of each. They want all the pasture-raised plus they wanted the organic.

We found people love both. And again, our dozens that we sell are surprisingly almost equal almost.

DEBRA: I found a new egg from you that’s not on your website, but it’s at my store. And that is a soy-free egg. Tell us about that.

RICK LEIBEE: It is new. We’re excited about that. It’s interesting. In the last two or three years, we’ve had so many phone calls from consumers because (our number is there. I get phone calls from consumers) and the number one thing that people would ask me is, “Are you ever going to have a soy-free egg? My son is allergic.” They would tell me their story of taking their son or their daughter in the middle of the night with allergic reaction to soy. We didn’t know what to do. How do we do this?

Finally, we decided to see if we could do it. We did produce a product that’s only been out about seven or eight months. It’s still new.

And that one we decided, in addition to our normal, natural grains, we decided to go non-GMO on that as well and to make it, what we call, certified free-range, meaning, again, we’re fitting that definition of Certified Humane Free-

Range where around our farms are our barns where we keep those that are local farmer here, you’ve got 60, 70, 80-foot grass area around the barn and then a fence. So it’s not full pasture-raised, but there’s a lot of outdoor access.

So it’s a hybrid product in that it’s free-range, certified free-range. It’s non-GMO. But the real clincher for our people that were interested in it is it’s soy-free. Again, the reason that we didn’t decide to do it organic was that would have added – it’s already expensive as it is. It would have added another dollar or two by the time it hits retail.

So we’re trying to make it affordable for those people that really – there are some people that have a really serious allergic reaction to soy. We’re just trying to accommodate and help those kinds of people.

DEBRA: I totally understand that. I’m actually somebody who doesn’t eat soy, but I don’t go into those anaphylactic allergic reactions. And so I would love to have an organic soy-free egg. But I just do the organic. It’s more important to me than the soy-free, but if you were to make the perfect egg for me, it would be soy-free too.

But I understand why you made the choice that you did to make it affordable to the folks for whome soy-free is the most important choice.

So we’ve got about five minutes left, and I want to ask you two more questions. So omega-3, not free, what makes an omega-3 egg higher in omega-3?

RICK LEIBEE: That, thankfully, is a simple thing to do, which, when it comes to food, I love simple answers. We just change the diet of our normal, cage-free brown farm (we’d pick out certain farms) and we’d add several different kinds of feeds that are really high and nutrient-dense in omega-3 fatty acids.

The one that we found seems to work the best both for the hens to tolerate and actually thrive on is actually flaxseeds. We add a lot of flaxseeds, which are a great, healthy thing for people too. And the hens, we found, really enjoyed the taste and they really like it.

When you give them the right amount of it, you can suddenly boost the omega-3 fatty acids in the eggs by sometimes three, four, five and six times the normal omega-3 levels, which, again, for people who are really watching that in their diet, it’s a “neat, easy fix” so to speak and enjoy their egg, but also get that good omega-3 fatty acid.

DEBRA: I think what you’re proving here is that what you feed the egg, what you feed the chicken, comes out in the egg. And it’s going to go into our bodies for better or for worse. If you put in something to make more omega-3 (I mean, there’s omega-3 in the flax), you feed it to the chicken, and then we end up with omega-3 in our body. But the same thing would occur for the things we don’t want in our bodies as well.

RICK LEIBEE: As we all know, those things are a direct chain. As the chicken metabolizes the feed, it goes straight into the reproductive part of the chicken and the egg is formed, you can’t separate those things. It’s all part of the process, you might say.

DEBRA: Last question, fertile egg versus not fertile egg. Why would you want one or the other?

RICK LEIBEE: Well, there has been a number of studies through the years that have shown that hens that are fertile (meaning their eggs are fertile) where you allow roosters to stay in with them, the levels of the “not as good for your cholesterol” go down and the levels of the good cholesterol that we actually need in our body go up.

It’s not a huge number up and down, but there is a little bit of a change there, which is again one of those interesting things, metabolically speaking, that happen.

And so again, we have certain farms out of our 85 that we put in roosters at the right ratio to hens. And then the eggs are fertile. We actually have certain people that really like that. They even claimed they taste better. I’ve had both. I can’t tell a whole lot of difference, but there are people that really like that. And they like the different reading on the cholesterol that they get from the fertile egg.

So we’ve been producing fertile eggs for a number of years. We have some very loyal customers that really, really appreciate that effort that we do because they’re, again, a little bit more expensive because roosters are rowdy. They eat a lot. Roosters eat three or four times, I think, what a hen eats. When you put them in there, they do add to the excitement of things, so to speak.

There are people that like that, so again, we have certain farms that have chosen to go that way.

DEBRA: Well, as I’ve said earlier, I have raised chickens myself. I used to have them in my backyard until the police came and took them away because it’s actually illegal to have them here where I live in the city of Clearwater, Florida. That was not a nice experience, but it was wonderful to have the chickens.

Listeners, if you’ve ever not been around chickens, they are just really wonderful animals to have. And I know that a lot of people who raise chickens just love their chickens.

And it was such a wonderful experience for me to feed my chickens and know exactly what was going into their body that they were then making the eggs. And then to see the eggs come out then eat it. I was involved in that whole cycle of life from the feeding to the eating.

And it was just a wonderful experience to have. I’m glad that I got to do that as long as I did. If it wasn’t illegal, I’d still have chickens and eggs. But I must say that I am quite happy with your eggs as a substitute. As I’ve said, I was very happy to see those pastured eggs when they came in my store because that was exactly what I wanted.

So we’ve got about a minute left. Any final words you’d like to say?

RICK LEIBEE: I just appreciate, Debra, to be able to share about what we do. We’re passionate about it. We enjoy it. We’re consumers, again, as well. I think we can say that we are concerned about the same thing as our customers are concerned about. It helps us identify with the things that they go through.

We appreciate hearing from our customers. I’d like to say that. We do get a lot of e-mails and calls. It helps us. Like I said, the newest product we’ve got was a direct result of phone calls. So we do need to hear what people are thinking and how we can help them better take care of their families and their health.

DEBRA: Thank you so much. Again, the website is NaturesYoke, Y-O-K-E, dot come. Thank you so much for being here. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

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