Not so. Larger chickens tend to give larger eggs. When researching what chickens to buy as a wedding gift to friends, I went online and learned a lot about the relationship of egg sizes to breed. The gist I got from it was smaller bird = smaller eggs.
The egg guy I prefer at our local farm market offers eggs from free-range, organically fed (on those winter days when turning them out to pasture would not fill their stomachs) hens. Some of those eggs are huge. Many of the huge ones have double yolks. He says the jumbo eggs come mainly from the Rhode Island Red breed and that he seems to have gotten a family of twin-yolk layers.
I get eggs from a local co-op farmer. I don’t know if they can call them organic if the feed isn’t 100% organic, or if the grounds where they feed and eat bugs and dung and whatnot isn’t certified organic or whatever. What matters to me is the chickens are treated well and have free access to outdoors and are happy healthy birds.
Generally, eggs are $5.50/doz. Sometimes they’re on sale for $9/doz or 2 doz small eggs from new layers for the 1 doz price. Sometimes they have duck eggs, too. They’re always in re-used cartons that never match, and they’re usually a mixture of brown and white. The size inside the carton of a “standard” dozen probably ranges from medium to x-large, they’re never totally uniform.
If they don’t have eggs available, there are two small natural food stores near me that carry eggs from Wisconsin and Indiana, and I’ll go to those stores to get them. Call me a hippie or call me a snob, but I’m happy to support local farmers who are doing it right, and I don’t buy any factory farmed animal products.
They’re much more common from young hens, in Spain it’s actually a selling point for those (but they don’t sell young hen eggs separatedly at the supermarket, you have to go to a butcher’s or to the kind of butcher’s that sells only birds, bunnies and eggs). Young hens are also much more irregular in lying frequency and egg size.
Yeah, and the yolks are really rich. A neighbor of mind grew up on a farm and he said that they used to make ice cream with duck eggs and that he’s never had better ice cream in his life and now I’m obsessed with making duck egg ice cream.
Brown because that’s what available, large because I’d read that that was kinder and now that I know that’s not true it’s still just habit.
White eggs are OK, but a bit unfamiliar to me; illogical as it is, to me white eggs are almost, but not quite, eggs. Eggs as designed by Steve Jobs. Still enjoyable.
Why do you do that? It sounds an act of casual cruelty to prevent the geese having chicks when you don’t even want to eat the eggs, but I guess there must be a reason for it.
Population control. It’s a small pond/lake with wild mallards and such. The geeses are domestic geese that get fed and have a doghouse. We want no more of them, though.
ETA: I guess we could allow clutches to hatch, then eat the goslings, but early aborting works out well for us.
OK. I thought of that, but thought that a brood or two wouldn’t actually cause many problems - don’t the geese fly away later? But I trust you to know more about this than me.
The geese are huge; able to fly very short distances, but the pond has a split rail fence around it. Even a single egg hatching would be a disaster. We struggle to maintain the pond. The geese are destructive but one or two is worth the effort.
In the Netherlands, the difference between white or brown eggs is not even indicated on the box. Not even near Easter, where it is kind of important if you want to dye eggs.
Size; there are a couple of standardized sizes. No-one cares, the medium standard size it the most sold.
The biggest selling point is the living condition of the chicken and, to a lesser degree, the food it had. Some people make fun of all the different labels and brands saying there are so many.
Anyway, the cheapest eggs are from caged factory farming. Most bigger stores now boycot those eggs for being just too goddamned cruel.
Second cheapest is non-caged factory farming. Still horrible to the chicken, though. Most people think that non-caged farming is like this, when it is more like this.
Even better is the organic egg. Same conditions as the grass egg, but the chickens keep their beaks and they have company of a rooster per 10 chickens or so.
At the same top level is a high-tech farming method that still is very animal friendly, and most economically sustainble. The rondel system.That is the one I buy.
Why do you do that? It sounds an act of casual cruelty to prevent the geese having chicks when you don’t even want to eat the eggs, but I guess there must be a reason for it.
