I’m curious. I know that most egg producers, whether backyard or otherwise, want to cull the non-laying hens. I can understand how a factory farm could figure it out, but a backyard breeder? Explain how, please and thanks.
I’m not a poultry raiser, but friends are, and they have a list of guidelines to check, supplied by a local backyard chicken owner’s organization. Kind of like this one.
Stuff like comb colour and size, vent dimensions and state, and general feel of the chicken’s body when picked up.
They then isolate that chicken for a while and check that they still get the same general amount of eggs, to confirm. Or, of course, if that chicken lays in isolation, that’ll negatively confirm as well, I guess?
There’s also temporary conditions that may cause some or all chickens to stop laying, like weather or moulting. But there’s guidelines for those as well.
It’s comb colour. If the bird is laying the comb will be bright red. If not laying, the comb will be pale.
I have a quite possibly false memory of there being some kind of harness that could be attached to hens that would mark the eggs with a soft crayon as they were laid (like Raddles/Reddle/Ram Crayons, but for chickens, and for egg laying, not mating).
Did I just imagine that, or did such a thing ever exist?
Our hens are under natural light, so when day length shortens they all stop laying. In the spring (now) they begin again.
Ideally for efficiency, doing an all-in-all-out system is best. Let’s say you have 20 hens producing 17 eggs a day. When, due to age, the daily average drops, you get rid of the entire population (all out), clean the coop, and bring in 20 new hens (all in).
Our birds are pets. They go through henopause but we maintain them until they die. Our eggs are delicious, but very expensive.
I like to watch farming channels on youtube. One farmer raises laying chickens, and his trick is to buy a different breed of chicks every year. That way, he can tell at a glance which of his hens are one year old, two years old, or three years old. He says that after their third birthdays, the egg production falls off dramatically, and the hens are then butchered and sold as stewing hens.
Of course he doesn’t buy new breeds indefinitely. Obviously, after three years, he starts over with the original chicken breed.
Who needs a word-of-the-day calendar when you have the Dope…
Yeah, just today I learned both “henopause” and “factice”.
To add to that, some breeds lay white eggs, and some brown (mostly correlated with the color of the hen itself). My mom always alternates the colors whenever she buys new ones, so seeing which color is underrepresented gives a strong clue to which hen is underperforming.
Same for mom’s, but neither the birds themselves nor their feed are all that expensive. When you count the eggs that she sells to her neighbors (for a while there, at cheaper than even the regular eggs at the store), they more than pay for themselves. Oh, plus some costs for building the coop, and the self-refilling feeding trough, and such, but those were one-time costs.
In my youth I spent a summer working on a relatives small commercial egg farm of approx 20,000 chickens and they used the all-in/all-out method based purely on age.
Starting with chicks bought from a supplier they moved them to a open house until they were of laying age, then clipped and caged in one building for a year Then moved into another building when after another year they were all culled and sold to a major soup company.
I’ve seen the process of moving thousands of “spent hens” (the industry’s term for hens culled after peak laying) to slaughter. The birds were not pretty after spending their short lives in a laying house.
When I eat chicken soup it is made from scratch.
Not being snarky: do you also make it from free-range poultry?
I’ve seen stewing hens for sale in some of my local ethnic markets. They’re shrinkwrapped and frozen, and look like rubber chickens, the kind used as props by magicians and the like.
Yep, @kayaker , I’ve had many henopausal chickens. I swear they get hot flashes🙂
I can’t bear to whack em. Don’t wanna pluck em. Ain’t gonna eat em. So we provide a old hens coop for them. Don’t want the young gals messing with them. Occasionally an egg will come from the old hens nest. You can tell they’re proud of them.
They have their dotage and meet their maker, eating like there’s no tomorrow.
The expense is all relative to what you’re willing to afford. I don’t really do the math. If I did I’d probably quit keeping them altogether.
I don’t have so many we can’t tell who’s not laying. They tend to get in the same box every night. Many days without an egg in their box and we make decisions.
Yeah, the pale comb will out em, though.
Yes, because our neighbor has a farm market and I helped them set up a slaughterhouse setup (long story). We get Pasteur raised chickens either free or half price (they are ridiculously expensive).
Every so often one of our hens will have such low estrogen levels, that their background level of testosterone actually causes behavioral male behaviors and they will “crow” (a weak ass crow) and mount their sisters. They strut around like cocks.