How Do Your Eggs Stack Up?
(Page 5 of 6)
April/May 2007
By Laura Sayre
For help deciding which breeds to keep, consult Mother’s Chicken and Egg Page, which features a number of articles from our Archive about chicken breeds, or the list of chicken resources on the Web maintained by John Henderson at Ithaca College. Other helpful organizations include the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and the Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities. (See The Chicken Keeper's Library for more on all of these resources).
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Some advocates say heirloom breeds lay longer — up to five years or more — although the truth may be that backyard producers are just more tolerant of older hens, who gradually lay fewer eggs (commercial layers are typically kept for two years at most). Egg quality, as opposed to quantity, depends more on husbandry than breed. “What they’re eating is the key factor,” Heinrichs says. For the healthiest eggs, give your birds maximum access to fresh grazing. As Salatin puts it, “The most important thing is to keep moving the pen around your yard. You don’t want to see any dirt in their run. If you see dirt, you’re not moving them enough.”
Filling feeders at midday, rather than in the morning, also encourages birds to do more foraging. Chickens love insects and will happily lower your garden’s populations of grasshoppers, slugs and cabbage worms if allowed to browse among the broccoli. They generally won’t bother established crops in the garden, although they may help themselves to a low-hanging tomato or two. If you can’t move your birds around or let them out, do everything you can to provide them with green stuff where they are. Confined birds will avidly eat lawn clippings, weeds from the garden and vegetable waste from the kitchen.
With all these benefits, will a backyard flock pay for itself? Well, maybe. Carol Bracewell, another Madison chicken keeper, offers this assessment of her two-hen system: “A bag of organic feed costs $20 and lasts nine to 10 weeks. If we get 105 eggs in 70 days (1.5 eggs a day), that’s 19 cents each, or $2.28 per dozen. Organic eggs are more than that at the store, so if we don’t count the cost of building the coop (from scrap) and putting up fences, then we probably come out ahead.” And if you can find organic feed at a lower price, the cost analysis will be even better. Mother’s editors get their organic feed directly from a local farmer for about half what Bracewell pays.
But Bracewell admits that her primary motivation for keeping chickens is not economic. In fact, she has a whole flock of additional reasons. She likes animals, but is allergic to cats and dogs. She enjoys observing the birds’ behaviors and interactions. Above all, as a city dweller living on “a tiny lot,” she yearned “to be more connected” with farming and food production. She and her partner, Larry, have even discussed whether they should “recycle” their hens via the soup pot when they come to the end of their useful laying lives. They have grown attached to their birds, but they think eating them is a matter of principle, a way of respectfully acknowledging the chickens’ role in the cycles of life and death.
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