Chickens Every Day
Dedicated to helping backyard chicken owners keep the happiest and healthiest flocks we can.
Chickens Every Day
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.
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: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: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:Okay, 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: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:Next question what 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: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 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: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: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: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:Oh, a great story 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: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: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: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: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 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: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: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: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.
