From Coop to Kitchen: What Every Backyard Chicken Enthusiast Should Know About Eggs

Chickens naturally produce eggs almost daily without needing a rooster, though timing depends on breed, with production breeds like Leghorns giving 5-6 eggs weekly while heritage breeds produce 4-5 eggs per week.

• Hens show clear signs before laying: bright red combs and wattles, submissive squatting behavior, and interest in nest boxes
• First eggs may be tiny "fairy eggs" without yolks or shell-less eggs before regular production begins
• The float test determines egg freshness - fresh eggs lay flat in water while old eggs float
• Newly laid eggs have a protective coating called "bloom" that seals thousands of tiny pores
• Egg production depends on daylight hours (14-16 hours needed) and decreases in winter or during stress
• No evidence supports conspiracy theories about feed companies sabotaging backyard egg production
• Higher quality chicken feed results in more eggs per hen annually
• Farm eggs offer thicker shells, more omega-3s, better cholesterol profiles, and higher beta-carotene than store eggs
• Commercial egg cartons are dated by packaging day, not laying day, often 4 or more weeks old at purchase

Check out our videos at CENLA Backyard Chickens on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook.

Transcript

Welcome to Chicken Every Day

Speaker 1 0:02

Are we ready , pawpaw ? Hello friends and welcome to Chicken . Every Day , a podcast for you , the backyard chicken enthusiast , and mine . Your host is my Pawpaw , gary , Gary Valerie of Senla Backyard Chickens . Here we have fun while sharing ideas and learning how to care for our foul-feathered friends . Check out our videos at Senla that's C-E-N-L-A Backyard Chickens on YouTube , tiktok and Facebook . So , without further ado , let's start today's show . How was that ?

Speaker 2 0:34

Hello friends , gary , with CENLA , backyard Chickens and the Chickens Every Day podcast , I hope everybody's doing great . And if you did like I did and got some chicks in the fall , well , now you're at the point this spring where you should be getting those first eggs . Maybe you're close to getting them , so you're really anxious about it . So just be patient . They're coming real soon , I promise .

Speaker 2 0:53

Well , a few weeks ago I was invited to come speak at a public library in a town about an hour away from here and I gave a presentation a PowerPoint presentation to some elementary children , children and their parents , and it was a lot of fun . I really enjoyed doing that and they're surprised . For the kids at the end of it was , I brought out two hens and the kids got to pet them . We got to talk about them . The questions started flowing . Most of the questions even came from the parents and a lot of it was have to do with eggs . So that's what we're going to talk about today the chicken eggs . It's not a real big deep dive into them , but it gives you a lot of it will have to do with eggs . So that's what we're going to talk about today the chicken eggs . It's not a real big , deep dive into them , but it gives you a lot of information that you may or you may not know about the great egg .

Speaker 2 1:33

Okay ,

Basics of Egg Production

Speaker 2 1:34

one of the first questions that they asked was do I need a rooster to have eggs ? And the answer to that is no , you certainly do not need a rooster . Just like a human woman ovulates once a month , she produces one egg . A bovine or different animals like that may ovulate a couple of times a year . Each time they will produce a number of eggs . Well , a chicken just happens to ovulate almost every day . About every 27 or so hours or so , maybe even a little bit sooner , she's going to ovulate and she'll produce an egg . She does not need a rooster around to do that . However , a rooster is needed if you plan to hatch those eggs and get some chicks out of the deal . Next question how soon will they start laying ? Well , a lot of that depends on the breed . There are breeds out there today like a leghorn , and a lot of that depends on the breed . There are breeds out there today like a Leghorn and Kana that were specifically bred up over the years to produce the maximum amount of eggs too . We've got gnats that they can . These chickens are going to give you five , six eggs a week . No chicken gives you an egg every day . Heritage breed chickens like most of us have at home the Delawares , the Bard Rock , rhode Island , red , new Hampshire's , things like that they're going to give you four to five eggs a week and that's sometimes . That's a good number with them . So no chicken is going to give you that each and every week .

Speaker 2 3:00

Okay , how can I tell if we're getting ready ? Chickens give you a few signs to let you know if they're getting ready . One is her cones and wattles will take a sudden growth spurt , turning very , very dark red . If it happens to be those type of cones and wattles on them , you know your hen's getting ready . One of the most telling things is that she will start doing the submissive behavior . You'll come by one day and all of a sudden she squats . That's a submissive behavior and they submit to roosters if they have any roosters around . Her hormones are kicking in . She's getting ready to start ovulating , getting ready to start laying those eggs . She may even start hanging around the nest box . She may even sing the chicken song a couple of times . All of this is her body preparing , getting ready to lay some eggs .

Speaker 2 3:47

Next question what

Signs Your Hen Will Lay Soon

Speaker 2 3:49

about my first eggs ? Those could sometimes be a surprise . A lot of times you're gonna get what we call a fairy egg and that's a little tiny egg like that . Most of the time the eggs not even gonna have a yolk inside of it , just gonna be a very small egg . Sometimes you'll get a shell-less egg that doesn't have a shell on the back of it . But be patient . If you know you got your birds are good and healthy and getting good , healthy food , the shell's coming , don't worry about that . The next one oh , how do I know if the eggs I have are good and fresh ?

Speaker 2 4:19

One of the easiest things that we do is called a float test . You take an egg and you submerse it in water . If it lays down flat in that glass of water , it's a very fresh egg . If it tilts itself up but

Testing Egg Freshness

Speaker 2 4:32

still touches the water , it's got a little bit of age to it . If it floats all the way to the top , probably not a great idea to eat that egg . It's got too much air inside of it .

Speaker 2 4:43

What happens to an egg when a chicken lays an egg ? There are literally thousands of teeny , teeny , tiny pores that are in this egg and she lays what's called a bloom . That's an outer coating , that's clear , and it seals in that egg and it seals out bacteria . It seals out oxygen . As the egg matures , this bloom slowly starts to deteriorate . The pores start to get bigger and bigger until they start touching one another . Air and oxygen is allowed to come in . The way nature works this . By the time oxygen comes in , the chick has grown enough and matured enough inside the egg that it can fight off any unwanted bacteria . So the oxygen shows up just in the right time for this little animal to start breeding . It's really an amazing thing .

Speaker 2 5:29

Ah , how many will they lay ? Or do they lay every day ? We answered that question a while ago . No , they do not . Do they lay year-round ? Well , the answer to that is no .

Speaker 2 5:40

There's all kind of things that can stop a chicken from laying . Stress will stop a hen from laying . If you have dogs that come around , stress your chickens out . If birds of prey are flying around a lot , they see them . They stress your chickens a lot . If it's too hot , it stresses the chickens a lot . All kind of things will keep our birds from laying . Most notably , an ovulation for a chicken is determined by the amount of sunlight that she receives . For good egg laying , a hen needs 16 , 18 hours a day to really do the max production . Most of the chicken houses for production forms will have artificial lighting in to do this . This is Louisiana . At our best we're gonna have 14 , 15 hours or so , so it's really not optimum For that . You get further up in the northern hemisphere in the summer and you get a few more hours of daylight , but they don't lay year-round . When the winter comes especially , it starts getting dark and they're not going to lay as much . So if you want them to lay , you need to kind of use a little supplemental lighting in there , and you can check out my videos . I have a video that talks about that and there's specific ways you want to do that to be as gentle on your chickens as you can , specific ways you want to do that , to be as gentle on your chickens as you can .

Speaker 2 6:54

Oh , a great story

The Feed Quality Difference

Speaker 2 6:55

you're going to love to hear about . You may have already heard about it . When COVID happened , the chicken boom went crazy . People started buying chickens and raising them up , thinking they were going to get their own fresh eggs . It was kind of like things were happening with the toilet paper . People wanted more and more chickens , so they just snatched everything up . They're afraid they're going to run out of eggs . One of the unfortunate parts of that happened is these people started getting on the internet , youtube especially , and throwing out these videos of conspiracy theories .

Speaker 2 7:26

The most popular one was that the United States government decided it would make Purina who's been around for what almost 200 years has a very big reputation , a very big name , to protect , but anyway made them . Well , first off , they said that they own Purina , which they don't . They're a corporation . They do not own the corporation , but they made Purina put something in their chicken feed to make chickens stop laying , and specifically backyard chickens like the ones that you and I have , not the chickens that go through the production farms . So apparently the United States government were going hey , all these people with two , three , four chickens in the yard , they're gonna wreck the economy if we don't do something about this , so we're gonna make them stop laying . So , and then they got on the internet , they printed out these papers and see , I showed you . This is proof that that Purina is being forced to do this and this is why our chickens are not laying eggs .

Speaker 2 8:25

Sure enough some person goes oh my goodness , I feed them this brown to feed . They're not laying . So she changes out . Two or three weeks later they start laying again and she assumes , or he assumes , that is the reason why . So they throw a video out there and the conspiracy just rolls on and on and on and it was almost laughable . The unfortunate thing about it is so many people thought that this was so . These conspiracy theorist guys just really seemed like they knew what they were talking about and I'm sorry they just didn't . You cannot convince me that the government came down and said you are going to make these poor , poor people in the backyard their chickens are going to quit laying because there's going to be trouble if they don't . It just didn't happen .

Speaker 2 9:09

But I will tell you one thing that will make a difference . It's the quality of the feed . Purina did a test a few years ago and I think they took four flocks . Each flock has six chickens in it and every manufacturer of chicken food , including Purina and some of the major brands , always has their bargain brand that's a lot cheaper than their highest quality brand . And look at the tags , folks . Look at the ingredient tags and you'll see the difference between fillers and actual ingredients on there . But anyway , so they fit two of these , these Fox , the bargain brand of food . They fit two of these flocks . They're their highest brand of few they're they're most nutritious . That they call I think it's layena is the particular one that they call their high-end food . At the end of the year they did all the calculations . Well , come to find out . Because chicken eats to their caloric requirements , they ate more of the cheaper brand and less of the more expensive brand that had the better nutrients in it and so they kind of offset that way . And , more importantly , they each average six dozen more eggs with the better feed than they did with the lower feed . So you could certainly feed your chickens a lower upgrade of food if eggs is not your , your big concern . But understand that this feed , that they're going to eat a little more of it and they're not going to lay quite as well . So understand all of that going in .

Speaker 2 10:35

I Get asked a lot of time and someone at that at the library asked our chickens eggs . Our chickens eggs that we get at home or out on the farm , better for you than store-bought eggs , and nutritionally they're almost identical . Some of the differences are , and nutritionally they're

Farm Eggs vs. Store-Bought Eggs

Speaker 2 10:52

almost identical . Some of the differences are my bird's free range , so they have a varied diet . They get a high-quality feed that stays in there . They eat it as they want , but then they go outside and they're eating bugs and worms and grass and crickets and all kind of things . They're scratching in the dirt , they're doing chicken and whenever this happens things like the shells usually get a little bit thicker . The omega-3s are usually a little bit more in these eggs . The good cholesterol levels boost up a little bit in them and that's all because of the variation in their diet . They get a really nice varied diet where birds that are in these chicken houses . They get fed a specific diet and that's all they eat until it's time to go to the butcher shop . So these eggs . There is a difference in the eggs as far as the quality of them goes . What else do we have ? Oh yeah , beta-carotene is something that's higher in these eggs as well . Farm eggs are almost always going to be fresher .

Speaker 2 11:48

I sell eggs out here . The average age of my eggs are going to be about a week to a week and a half old . Some of them are going to be that very day that I put out there in the egg stand . By law the date on an egg carton is stamped the day that it is packaged , not the day that it is laid . It can be laid one day and a week later it can be packaged . The average date at the supermarket is four to six weeks on a carton of eggs and if you look at that carton it'll have a number on it and let's say that number says 254 . Those eggs were packaged , not laid . They were packaged on the 254th day of the year . If the number is 007 , they were packaged on January 7th , the seventh day of the year . So understand how these egg packaging work .

Speaker 2 12:36

I love selling my eggs . People talk about them all the time . It's a wonderful thing . I love having these chickens out here . I really hope you're enjoying your birds as well . I hope this thing , this little talk about eggs , made a little sense to you and you enjoyed it . Thank you , guys so much . Have a wonderful day and we'll talk with you soon . Bye-bye .

Speaker 1 12:54

That's all we have time for today . I really hope you enjoyed listening to the podcast . Be sure to watch our videos . So , on behalf of my Papa , gary , and me , sylvia , thanks for listening .