Category: Chickens/Poultry

Right on cue, we’ve run short of eggs to sell. This is harvest season, so the farmers’ markets are jammed with customers. That’s part of it. And we’re in the long, slow decline in egg output that starts at the end of May and continues through December. This happens every year.

Next year, we’ll try starting an unusually large number of pullet chicks in January and February, to fill the production gaps with young hens who are just starting to lay. Maybe we can delay the day of reckoning until October that way, after the harvest-season crowds start to slacken and the problem starts to solve itself.

That’s the problem with doing the “real outdoor hens” gig — it’s harder to fool Mother Nature. Eggs are more seasonal than with confined hens.

So if you’re one of our egg customers, show up at the farmers’ market early to avoid disappointment!

Packaging costs more than you might think. We’re paying about $0.30 per egg carton these days, and we buy ’em 1,000 at a time!

The economy has not been kind to our egg-carton supply. Pactiv closed the Northern California plant that made our egg cartons, so our egg cartons are coming up from Mexico, adding a lot of shipping/energy cost into the mix.

Fortunately for us, we live in God’s Country, Western Oregon, where lots of people are eager recyclers and the state regulations aren’t all written by compulsive hand-washers. Not yet, anyway. It’s perfectly legal to use clean, used egg cartons in Oregon, so we do. And not just ours — anybody’s. We’ll stick our labels on top of whatever was there before, and that makes ’em ours.

So we’re in a pretty good position where cartons are concerned. Our customers bring us huge stacks of cartons and give them to us free, gratis, and for nothing, glad to see they aren’t wasted. We use ’em until they get dirty or start falling apart.

This isn’t legal everywhere. I swear that, in some states, the food-safety rules were written by Howard Hughes. I can find no mention of used-egg-carton-borne illness having ever happened anywhere, even once, but that doesn’t prevent some states from banning it. Oddly, some of the midwestern states seem to be particularly anti-farmer. That’s just plain weird.

Anyway, if you go the used-carton route for your own flock, here are a few tips for you:

• If you sell any eggs in grocery stores, use new cartons for these. The same people who will happily accept a used carton when you’re selling face-to-face won’t touch anything that’s the least bit shopworn in a retail store. Strange but true.
• Always put a rubber band around the egg carton, especially if it’s used. Used cartons are floppier than new ones and may not stay closed on the trip home. For marginal cartons, use two rubber bands.
• When cartons get too dirty or wrecked, into the wood stove with them! Fires are a lot easier to start if you use heavy stuff like cardboard or egg cartons in addition to paper and kindling. Get one last use out of them this way. (Two, if you have a good use for the ashes, which we do.)
• Egg cartons are all the same except for Jumbos, which are bigger. So you can mix or match all your cartons except the Jumbos.

When we were starting out, we believed that old-fashioned breeds of chickens would do better on old-fashioned farms. A lot of people believe this. The idea is that heritage breeds are best, while modern commercial breeds are suitable only for factory farming.

Alas, that’s not how it works. For starters, there has always been a distinction between show birds (which are supposed to look pretty) and utility birds (which are supposed to turn a profit through their meat or eggs). Never the twain shall meet. Once heritage breeds were supplanted by modern hybrids, that was the end of the heritage utility breeds! You’ve basically got a bunch of low-producing show birds on the one hand, and high-producing modern hybrids on the other. The middle range, with some exceptions, has gone extinct.

And even utility breeds of yesteryear are nothing to write home about. I did extensive work with California Grays and Rowley New Hampshires, both of which were cutting-edge in the Fifties, but modern hybrids ran rings around them in our hyper-old-fashioned pastured environment. Hmmmm…

In fact, the hybrids are just better, period. They grow fast and have low mortality. The egg-type hens lay huge numbers of high-quality eggs, while the broiler produce enormous amounts of high-quality meat compared to the heritage breeds.

Last time I did the math, I figured that, to sell heritage broilers instead of modern Cornish Cross broilers, I’d have to charge three times as much to make the same money. Not only were there no takers, but I myself was far from convinced that the old-timey birds were worth even the same price per pound.

So my advice is the same as always: test, test, test. We tried everything, and settled on what worked for us. The things you’re told and the things that work are never the same things, so you have to test.