When you are a new homestead, one of the first big decisions you make is also one of the most personal: what are you going to put in front of your animals every single day? At Getaway Homestead here in Grayson, Kentucky, we raise egg-laying hens, pastured meat chickens, and guinea fowl. We sell those eggs and that meat to our neighbors and customers, which means every choice we make ends up on somebody's dinner table. So we did not take feed lightly.
After a lot of reading, label-squinting, and honest conversation about our values, we landed on Ernst Grain & Livestock's Wholesome Harvest line. Here is the full story of why, and we are not going to dodge the parts that get people fired up.
We Started From Scratch, and That Was a Gift
We are new. We did not switch to Wholesome Harvest from another feed because we never had a "before." That turned out to be an advantage. Instead of unlearning old habits, we got to ask one clean question from day one: if we could feed our birds anything, what would we actually want in the bag?
The answer kept coming back to the same short list. Whole grains instead of byproducts. No genetically modified ingredients. Real support for gut health. Something made by people, not a faceless mill. Wholesome Harvest checked every box.
What Is Actually In the Bag
Ernst Grain & Livestock is a seventh-generation family farm in Clear Spring, Maryland, and they mill the Wholesome Harvest feeds themselves. Their All Flock and Layer blends are built on non-GMO cracked grains, fortified with vitamins and minerals, and then loaded with extras you rarely see spelled out on a feed tag.
Every Wholesome Harvest mix we use includes multiple species of live probiotics, prebiotics to help bind toxins, essential oils and herbs, linseed (flax) oil as a source of omega-3s, kelp for trace minerals, and diatomaceous earth. The layer blend also adds oyster shell for eggshell strength. It is whole grain based, which means no powdery mess at the bottom of the feeder and no mystery byproduct fillers.
That ingredient list is not just marketing. Nearly every item on it is backed by real research. Here is what convinced us.
The Omega-3 Eggs Are Not a Gimmick
The flax oil in Wholesome Harvest is there for a reason. When hens eat flaxseed or flax oil, they deposit those omega-3 fatty acids directly into the yolk. This is one of the most well-documented effects in poultry nutrition.
Feeding laying hens flaxseed reliably raises the omega-3 content of their eggs and shifts the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio toward the healthier range, without hurting egg production or egg quality. In fact, some studies found flax supplementation actually improved egg weight and internal quality. A separate feeding trial showed that increasing dietary flax steadily raised the alpha-linolenic acid, EPA, and DHA in the yolk, the exact omega-3s people take fish oil pills to get.
So when we tell our customers their eggs are omega-3 enriched, we are standing on solid science, not a sticker.
Gut Health Is the Whole Ballgame
If there is one thing we have learned fast, it is that a bird is only as healthy as its gut. This is where the probiotics and prebiotics in Wholesome Harvest earn their place.
A large systematic review of poultry studies found that probiotics modify the intestinal microbiota, stimulate the immune system, reduce inflammation, block pathogens from taking hold, and improve growth and laying performance. Another recent review put it plainly: probiotics improve gut health by crowding out harmful bacteria, strengthening the gut lining, and tuning the immune system, which translates into better feed conversion and, for laying hens, better egg production and quality.
Prebiotics feed the good bacteria that the probiotics deliver, and the two together (sometimes called synbiotics) work better than either alone. For pastured meat birds that need to grow well and stay resilient outdoors, and for layers we need laying consistently, a healthy gut is not a luxury. It is the foundation. Wholesome Harvest builds that in from the first bite.
Now the Part People Argue About: GMOs and Glyphosate
We promised we would not dodge this, so here it is. A huge reason we chose Wholesome Harvest is that it is non-GMO. To us this is not about fearing the letters G-M-O. It is about what usually rides along with genetically modified feed crops: the weedkiller glyphosate.
Roughly 80% of GM crops are engineered to tolerate glyphosate, and globally about 57% of corn and 85% of soybeans go into animal feed. Because glyphosate-tolerant crops can be sprayed directly, and because glyphosate is also used to dry down some crops before harvest, residues end up in the feed itself. Those residues have been detected in animal feed, poultry tissue, eggs, and water.
A 2025 scientific review in the World's Poultry Science Journal laid out the concern directly. Glyphosate has documented antimicrobial and mineral-binding properties, and chronic exposure through feed has been linked in the research to disruptions in gut microbiota, oxidative stress, and effects on liver and kidney function, growth, immune function, and reproduction in poultry. An earlier review noted that even though glyphosate is known to affect a wide range of gut bacteria, its effect on the gut microbiota of livestock is still surprisingly under-studied.
Here is where we will be straight with you. This is a genuinely contested topic. Major regulatory agencies remain divided on how dangerous glyphosate is, and reasonable scientists disagree about the real-world risk at the residue levels found in food. We are not claiming conventional eggs are poison, and we are not going to pretend the science is fully settled, because it is not.
What we can say is this. There is a plausible mechanism by which glyphosate could harm the very gut microbiome we are working so hard to build with probiotics. It would be a little absurd to pay for probiotics in the feed while pouring in residues that may undercut them. So we made the precautionary choice. Non-GMO feed sidesteps the biggest glyphosate exposure route entirely, and for a product we sell to families, we would rather err on the side of clean. If the science eventually says we were overly cautious, we can live with that. The reverse is harder to live with.
Supporting a Real Family Farm
There is one more reason, and it matters to us as much as the nutrition. Wholesome Harvest is milled by an actual multi-generational family farm, not a corporate conglomerate. When we buy their feed, our money goes to people doing the same kind of work we are doing, just at a different scale.
Homesteading, for us, has never only been about our own patch of Kentucky. It is about strengthening the whole web of small producers who are trying to make good food outside the industrial system. Every bag we buy is a small vote for that world. We think our customers feel the same way, because the people buying pastured eggs and meat from a little farm in Grayson are usually the same people who care where the feed came from too.
The Bottom Line
Feed is not glamorous, but it is where the quality of your eggs and meat is actually decided. We chose Ernst Grain & Livestock's Wholesome Harvest because it lines up with everything we are trying to be: whole grain and honest instead of byproduct filler, non-GMO to keep our animals and your food clean, backed by real research on omega-3s and gut health, and made by a family farm we are proud to support.
We are new at this, but we did our homework, and we stand behind what is in our feeders. When you crack one of our eggs or cook one of our chickens, you are tasting the result of that choice. We think you will taste the difference too.
