These Eggs Taste Yellow

Last week, on Wednesday morning, someone in the office had the genius to cook up some eggs for breakfast. He took half a dozen down to the canteen, broke them into a bowl and microwaved them to perfection. We had scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in a style which I believe the Italians call 'al desko'. A conversation followed about why were they so yellow, they even tasted yellow; almost theatrically yellow. I figured it was down to the grass in the hens diet and left it at that.

I didn't give it much more thought until Sunday breakfast when the same topic arose. Milo proposed that they were yellow because Daddy puts mustard in the scrambled eggs. Sabine had a slightly less surreal explanation. She suggested that they became yellow if Lucky sat on them. (She's our resident broody hen.)

I figured I should be able to come up with some better theories. It must have something to do with the feed and environment. Firstly, hens require a large volume of good clean water. Since eggs are mostly water and protein. These chooks have their water mains pressured to a header tank and delivered to gravity fed drinking trays.

Then there is the protein. This comes from their layers pellets which are 17% protein. The feed comes from Hi-Peak feeds in Derbyshire. They mill the cereals and package into sacks for delivery on a pallet. It is strictly non-GM and contains the following ingredients. Wheat, non-GM hi-protein soya, calcium carbonate, prairie meal, linseed, vitamins and minerals.

Your regular factory farmed free range hens stop about there. Water and layers pellets are sufficient for a healthy diet. Guerrilla hens go a little further and add two other ingredients. Mixed corn is fed ad-lib. The hens love it but it's protein content is on the low side at 10.5% and if protein intake drops then egg production can slow down. The principle components are whole wheat, split maize and organic soya oil. The maize is bright yellow!

Finally, there is fresh grass. Guerrilla Hens forage on fresh grass, a system of electric nets means that they can regularly be moved to fresh pasture. Factory farmed free range means up to 2,500 birds per hectare and very little will grow under such high stocking density.
These Guerrilla Hens have plenty of space to rummage in the undergrowth. I believe it is the treats they find while foraging, together with the grass that gives them the depth of flavour sometimes called yellow.

Gold Rush and the Petaluma Colony System

The Petaluma colony system is an outdoor production system for egg layers named after an attractive Californian City in Sonoma County. A fertile and wholesome place, the town really began to prosper at the beginning of the gold rush in 1849. The area soon became the centre of a rapidly growing poultry industry serving the growing metropolitain districts. A temperate climate, lush farmland and proximity to the urban population of San Francisco made it perfectly suited to poultry production. It was at one time known at the "Egg Capital of the World" and the home to the inventor of the first modern egg incubator in 1879. (The Egyptians had beaten him by a few thousand years).

The egg laying industry of Petaluma was based around family run farms each with several thousand hens. The Californian poultry farmers hit upon the following system of production which is regaining popularity today. The hens live in colonies of around 200 birds. Each colony is served by a common feeding area, a communal egg laying house and a drinking station. The colony is sleeps in movable roosting houses containing around 50 hens each. The key aim of the Petaluma system is to maximise the peace and harmony within the flock while minimising the labour inputs. I have tried to implement this labour saving system on our small-holding; it suits the dawn and dusk raids by the guerrilla farmer. With a single feed point, the hoppers can be filled once a week from the back of a tractor (or horse drawn cart). In an age before pressurised running water, having a single drinking point was also a labour saving ruse. In our case we have a mains pressured trough linked to gravity fed waterers

In the roosting house, roost bars are 24 inches above bare ground where the manure accumulates for a few weeks until the house is towed to fresh ground. The manure is removed to the compost heap and ultimately finds its way to the vegetable garden. The roosting houses were traditionally very open structures, often a simple roof with walls sheltering three sides and almost completely open on the fourth. This leaves the sleeping birds quite exposed to predators but the large flow of fresh air keeps them healthy. Birds suffer more than most creatures from respiratory illness so a closed structure with damp air is to be avoided. Our roosting house is very similar with an over-sized roof and wide ventilation gaps on three sides.

The benefit of splitting the sleeping quarters from the egg laying nest boxes are two-fold. The manure is kept a good distance from the eggs and the egg gathering by the farmer is all from one place. During the day, the hens lay their eggs in a spotless laying house stacked high with nest boxes each brimming with clean wood-shavings and sawdust. The wood-shavings dry out muddy feet keeping the eggs picture perfect. The nest boxes have been fashioned from wooden wine cases. The names of the finest vineyards known to humanity furnish the insides of our laying house; a generous gift from my oenophilic neighbour. It is kept dark inside the laying house. The smell of the dry wood-shavings and all those wine cases makes it a special place to go hunting for hen-fruit on a sunny afternoon.

Modern practitioners of the colony system advocate a line of electric fencing to keep predators from the roosting house. Since our small-holding is on the edge of town we see rather a lot of foxes, so I decided to build a 9 strand electric fence as the perimeter of a one acre grassy plot. After several weeks' success things started to go wrong in December. The fox enjoyed hopping through the wires and was helping himself to a feathery breakfast of chicken sushi. After one attack on 'the colony', the hens also decided to start darting through the wires if only to escape from Charlie. I have since gone back to electric netting which has done the job of keeping the birds in and fox out. To further defend against night-time raids from badgers, mink, owls etc I have fitted light-activated electronic door openers. With some weeks of training, the hens now put themselves to bed at dusk and wait patiently for the doors to open in time for breakfast. I'm considering investing in a child sized version for the house.

For further reading on Alternative Poultry Production Systems and Outdoor Access http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/poultryoverview.html#layers

La Copper Marans

The egg laying flock currently numbers around 60 birds. The dominant breed is the Marans at about 45 birds all at 6 months old and just coming into their first lay. These birds arrived as day old chickens last September. They hatched in Belgium in the morning, travelled by truck, ferry and white van to arrive with us by tea time.
They are not a particularly rare breed but are certainly uncommon in the UK and North America. The breed originates from the town of Marans in the west of France and remains a popular breed throughout France to this day. The unique feature of the Marans is its ability to lay chocolate-brown coloured eggs. Its a bit of a gimmick but important in the constraints it places on the grower. In order to produce such a rich mahogany shell the hen has to produce these pigments internally and so far no one has been able to genetically speed up this process. Therefore the breed has an upper limit to the number of eggs a hen might produce in a year; around 250. A commercial flock of genetic super hens can expect a laying rate of 325 per year.
With these French birds on the equivalent of a 35 hour week, you can at least be sure that they're enjoying life and not worrying unduly about their laying responsibilities.

They share their roosting shed with 8 Ixworth hens and a large Ixworth cockerel. These are large white utility birds, know for their fine table qualities and their wonderful cream shelled eggs. Being dual purpose these should be laying something like 220 eggs per year. They are currently laying quite a good number of smallish Farrow & Ball New White eggs.The balance of the flock have a different roosting house and are the remains of last summer's flock after several fox attacks through the winter. Charlie, the fox, left us with three Light Sussex, two large Ixworth hens and an elegant Dorking cock. If you find an enormous double yolker in your egg box then there is every chance that it came from one of these more mature ladies.

Chicken #5 your time is up.

Last August I begin hatching Ixworth chicks from 4 different sources. The Ixworth chicken is supposedly a 'Rare Breed'.
I think the breed is interesting for two reasons. It was the first serious attempt in the UK to develop a proper commercial breed that was both an excellent layer while retaining good eating qualities. Developed in the early 1930s by the now modestly famous Reginald Appleyard his efforts were somewhat over-shadowed by the war in Europe.
The second reason it's an interesting breed is because the plucky Brit failed. While he succeeded in creating an excellent table bird with good laying qualities this wasn't enough. The larger and more scientifically based poultry industries of the United States had made his product obselete. The American food industries had better genetics and the advent of large scale incubation meant hatcheries could churn out thousands of chicks per day and male chicks became disposable. It was now possible abandon dual purpose breeds . The industry bifurcated into specialist breeds for the table and for laying.
And this is where we are now. Hybrid layers will lay 325 eggs per year and a factory farmed supermarket chicken will go from hatching to chiller in less than 8 weeks. Mr Appleyard's Ixworth is good for neither which I guess puts it on the RBST (Rare Breed survival Trust) endangered list. (200 eggs per year and 4 months to table weight.)


Endangered is a bit of a stretch though. I've got a freezer full of them and had no trouble finding 4 different breeders. So back to last August. I hatched out 4 dozen eggs and reared them in the stables through 'till December. Having leg banded them and weighed them at intervals I could plot their growth rates and identify the lighter girls. After some weeks out in the snow and rain the boys were gathered up and have become curries, casseroles and chicken portions. The two prize cockerels were kept for breeding purposes. n The hens are to become my main layers of cream coloured eggs.
This should have left the girls happily mingling with their cousins (the Copper Marans) out in the field. However, on return from from our recent trip to India there was one cockle-doo-do-loo too many. It seems an undersized male had been masquerading as a lady hen and dodged the deep freeze. Chicken #5 is now on his way, God bless him.