Until recently, I had been feeding the hens two scoops of pellets and two scoops of fermented grain, twice per day. That amount was determined over time. I began with the amount recommended by theory and modified it after patient experimentation. I watched them eat and added or reduced the amount until they did not urgently scour the trough, but also did not completely clean the feed trough in one sitting. In payment for their room and board, they provided us with 12-16 eggs per day.
That number was a noticeable decrease from their past performance. However, it is common for hens to lay fewer, but bigger eggs in their second year. Since these are all two-year olds, we thought the change to be inevitable and looked forward to the spring, when the pullets will begin to lay.
When cold weather arrived in the early part of December, the hens grew hungrier and I began giving them an extra scoop of pellets at each feeding time. They have shown their appreciation for the extra feed by increasing their egg production to 18-20 eggs per day.
The sudden change prompts me to speculation. Did the extra feed lift them over a dietary limit that had been restraining their egg production? I doubt that the cold weather prompted the change, since the coop is protected from the majority of the temperature change. It is, however, a tricky business to judge causation.
The situation brings to mind a cartoon I like, in which two people are having a conversation.
Person 1: “I used to think that correlation implied causation, then I took a statistics class. Now I don’t.”
Person 2: “So, the class helped?”
Person 1: “I’m not sure.”
We are still getting the usual variety of shapes and sizes. Once the hens have laid a few eggs, they usually maintain a reasonable level of quality control. However, they sometimes slip up and produce an egg that approaches or exceeds the expected tolerances. The main image for this post shows some of the batch we sent to the market today. The second image shows the unusual eggs from that batch.
At the top of the image is a standard egg. Below, you can see the extremes of roundness and an egg that may have been laid without a yolk. Often, but not always, a hen that lays a yolkless egg will compensate for it with a double-yolk egg later on.
Some eggs have shapes that are too eccentric to fit well in a carton, have unsightly wrinkles or bulges, or have unappealing blemishes. We usually retain these eggs for home use and sell the pretty ones. Melissa makes an effort to place the eggs in the cartons so the colors form an appealing mosiac. We know her effort is appreciated because we have had customers compliment us on the presentation. Even though we chose most of our hens from the breeds that lay most efficiently, we intend to keep a few hens of the less-efficient breeds just to maintain the visual appeal of the cartons.
Even though our business depends on healthy returns on our investments, we still base some decisions purely on aesthetics.
Such a lot of variation in the eggs!