About the homestead

Two people, six dogs, and a lot more chickens than we planned on.

Granite Homestead is our place outside Prescott. It is my husband and me, and it started because we wanted to know where our own food came from. The hens are free-range around the property all day and go to sleep in their coop at night. Everything you get from us comes out of that yard.

Granite Homestead LLC dba The Prescott Egg Club Prescott, Arizona

A weathered coop and wire run built against giant granite boulders at golden hour, hens ranging over dry grass with mountains behind — Illustration of the property. Unwashed & ungraded

The story

We started with twelve identical chickens.

“We only ever meant to feed ourselves. Then the neighbors started asking.”

February 2025 — the first order.

My husband placed the first order in the first week of February 2025. Some meat birds, and twelve laying hens. What I had in my head was a fun, mismatched flock — the fluffy ones, the ones with the feathery afros, the ones that lay funny colors. What showed up was twelve White Leghorns, ordered as part of a hatchery batch deal called the Frying Pan Special. Twelve of the exact same white chicken. I was disappointed in a way that is now very funny.

So I started saying I wanted more. He said we did not need more. Then he kept driving to Cal Ranch or Tractor Supply for lumber or a fitting or some tool, and kept coming home with baby chicks. It got to the point where I was the one saying we did not need any more, and his defense was: you go stand in front of them and try to leave without any. It cannot be done. They are too cute and they want to live with us.

What began as wanting our own eggs turned into a small hobby farm. What was supposed to be a hobby is now closer to an addiction. At this point we have stopped calling ourselves chicken people and accepted that we are chicken addicts.

Who “we” is

Two of us, and two very different starting points.

It is my husband and me. He grew up in Wisconsin and worked on farms, so none of this was new to him. I grew up in the city in Las Vegas with zero experience at any of it. Chickens were absolutely a thought — I just never had the option to have them there.

I also never imagined I would be capable of killing an animal. That changed after the first couple of times I went hunting with him and understood what actual meat is.

Neither of us quit our day jobs for this. Between us we run a fleet washing and pressure washing business, a real estate brokerage, and a mobile dog grooming business. All of them are still going and growing.

Which is the honest reason this works. Our free time already gets spent on our businesses, so we built one that we really enjoy doing together.

Dixie, a honey-gold Buff Orpington hen, perched on the steering wheel of a pickup truck with pine trees through the windshield

Dixie, up on the dash where she believes she belongs.

Dixie's story

The first one who got a name

Dixie is a Buff Orpington, and she is the only one of ours who came out with white tail feathers and a neat white triangle across her back. That is how she ended up being the first hen we could pick out of the yard by sight — and once you can tell a hen apart, she gets a name.

She was also extra friendly about it. She would come up the driveway when we pulled in and hop right into the car if a door was open, which is not something we taught her and not something we could talk her out of.

So the name stuck, and she has been the face of the operation ever since.

The dogs

Nobody says the word “chicken” around here anymore.

I moved to Prescott from Las Vegas with three Akitas — Moose, Bear and Peanut. When I met my husband he had three of his own: Bear, Able and George. So there are six dogs here now, two of whom are named Bear, and we have made peace with that.

Early on I was teaching the Akitas that the birds were friends, and it went badly for a stupid reason. Every single day at breakfast and dinner I had been asking them if they were hungry for chicken. They knew exactly what that word meant. So we stopped using it. The birds have been called birdies ever since, and the Akitas now understand that birdies are friends.

Bear, Able and George are still in training on that point. My husband hunts, and it is genuinely hard to convince a bird dog that some birds are off limits. George is a Great Dane and has Dane brain, and I am not convinced any training method has ever corrected Dane brain.

Mostly everyone minds their own business. The dogs like lying near the hens and the turkeys and watching them tear around the yard, which appears to be the entire point of a yard.

The actual birds

Our own photos, taken on a phone, in the yard.

No stock photography and nothing borrowed. These are the birds that are actually here.

Dixie sitting on the passenger seat of a pickup truck, tail fanned out — She does not ask. The door opens and she is in.

A large black tom turkey in full strut with his tail fanned, in front of a wooden barn under a blue sky — One of the toms, holding court.

Close-up of a young turkey looking directly into the camera — The turkeys have no concept of personal space.

Close-up of a turkey's head and wattle with the rest of the flock behind — This is what happens every time we walk outside with a phone.

A group of bronze and white turkeys standing on gravel under a cloudy sky — Monsoon light, and the whole crowd came over.

A speckled black and white hen standing on top of a man's ball cap while he sits on the couch below her — A hen standing on my husband’s head in the living room. Nobody moved her. This is the problem.

White Cornish Cross meat chickens foraging on dry high-desert grass outside a homemade wood and wire chicken tractor

We did not start this to sell anything.

Why we bother

We wanted to know what we were eating.

“At least these animals have a good life before they are processed.”

We buy our beef by the cow. We hunt a lot, and a real share of what we eat is wild game. The first batch of meat birds happened because we wanted to raise our own chicken too, since I had gone down a long rabbit hole about what happens to poultry between the barn and the shelf and did not care for any of it.

Then we let those birds range in the yard, and neighbors walking by started asking whether they could buy some. We only had enough for us. That was not the plan at all, but the more people we talked to, the more of them turned out to want the same thing we did. We have run a few batches now — Cornish Cross and some other varieties — and having real food on the table is worth every bit of the work.

Going legitimate

Why we registered instead of handing eggs over the fence.

The plain math of it: if we were going to spend that much on birds, feed, fencing and equipment, we might as well build a business out of it. So we registered with the state as a nest run producer, learned what we are and are not allowed to say about our own eggs, and put the whole thing under The Prescott Egg Club so people could count on it instead of hoping.

It is also just something we like doing together, which is rarer than it sounds when you both run businesses. We are still a household, not a facility. The person who gathers your eggs is the person who drives them over and the person who answers your email.

The parts that go wrong

It is not all hens in the sunshine.

We lost one of our meat birds to an owl overnight. We have lost a few of the little ones to snakes that came onto the property while they were still small enough to be worth a snake's trouble.

That is the actual cost of letting birds live outside on real ground instead of indoors, and we would still rather do it this way. We just would rather you hear it from us than assume it never happens.

How we handle them

Out of the nest box and into a carton. That's it.

Roll-out nest boxes

Our nest boxes mount on the outside of the coop and slope. The hens sit on a cushioned pad, lay, and the egg rolls gently to a covered tray at the back, out from under everybody’s feet. Eggs are not sat on, stepped on, or laid in bedding, and the stainless trays wipe out in seconds. A clean box is how you get a clean egg in the first place, and that matters far more than anything we could do to an egg afterward.
Never washed

We do not wash them. Washing takes off the bloom the hen put on the shell, and legally we cannot wash or grade them anyway. That is what nest run means. More about the bloom.
Sorted only for safety

Anything cracked or odd stays on our own table. What is left is not graded or sized — a dozen is a dozen, big and small together, and shell colors vary.
Into a carton, into the truck

Cartons ride in a cooler on the route. When they reach you, we recommend putting them straight into the refrigerator.
Rinse at the pan, not at the shelf

Give each egg a quick rinse under warm running water right before you crack it. Warm, not cold — cold water can pull surface moisture inward through the shell. Cook them thoroughly.

An open kraft carton holding a dozen brown, cream and one pale blue egg on barn wood, twine-tied cartons alongside

A finished dozen and twine-tied spares, the way they land on the porch.

Transparency & compliance

Exactly what you are buying

Arizona has specific rules for producers like us, and we would rather over-explain them than have a member surprised at the refrigerator door.

Nest Run Eggs

What nest run means: These are nest run eggs: unwashed and ungraded, sold as-is, and not sorted by size or grade. Arizona requires that all advertising relating to nest run eggs be clearly marked “nest run,” which is why the phrase appears on our truck, our cartons and every page of this site.
Storage: Because they are unwashed they still carry the hen's natural bloom. We recommend refrigerating them as soon as they arrive, keeping them in the carton, rinsing each egg under warm running water immediately before use, and cooking them thoroughly. The long version is here.
Registration: Arizona Nest Run Producer, Unclassified Producer ID 4007030.
Supply: We only get so many eggs in a day, so what we can sell is limited and memberships are limited with it. When the route is full we open a waitlist rather than overpromise.
Who we are: Granite Homestead LLC, dba The Prescott Egg Club. Prescott, Arizona. The homestead is our family's home, so we do not publish the street address or take visitors.
Handling advice: As with any shell egg, cook thoroughly if you are serving someone pregnant, very young, very old, or immune-compromised. Ask us anything — hello@granitehomestead.com.

One route a week, out of one yard.

NEST RUN EGGS, delivered. Prescott, Prescott Valley, Chino Valley and Dewey.

From $12 a dozen · delivery included

Come be one of the households on the route.

Join The Prescott Egg Club