There is the food I am using and like I said earlier a little corn and table scrap as well. Is the something I can change to get larger eggs?
Maybe I said this before, but chicken feed is usually formulated/made to give just barely enough nutrition to get the hens to lay. The feed doesn't usually go above and beyond the minimum to keep the hens laying. At 16% they will lay. They may not need 18% to lay, but they can lay more easily at 18% and they will lay bigger eggs if they are capable of laying bigger eggs. And they won't be so quick to go out of laying during their molt or in the winter. It supports them in their laying better than 16% does, but they'll still lay at 16%. There is no layer that I know of that is 15% because hens don't lay properly at 15%. I used to be able to find 18% before we started formulating our own to 18%.
Depending on how many chickens you have and depending on the composition of your kitchen scraps, your hens may be getting 18% protein. Look at how much milk, yogurt, cheese, bacon, roast, fish, hamburger, eggs is in your scraps. All animal protein counts toward that 18% minimum. About 1/2 an ounce more per chicken will do the trick. So that's about 1/2 a slice of cheese (real cheese, not cheese food). So let them pick all the meat off any bones you have left over if you aren't already. Scrape all your pans if they have any bits of meat or eggs in them. You know the drill. And because the animal protein is a "complete" protein, you can more easily make up the difference depending on the lysine and methionine that's missing from the partial complete proteins in the grains and legumes. That's difficult (more work than I ever want to do) to evaluate based on the feed tag info alone.
Leghorns in the factory at about 70F (21C) eat about 4 ounces of feed a day when laying. Dual purpose chickens (the browns and blacks are more like a dual-purpose than like a leghorn) in 70F (21C) eat around 6 oz. of feed per day when in lay. They should mostly be getting that actual balanced feed if you want them to lay up to capacity both in numbers and size. However, economics plays a part and it's silly to not feed your scraps to the chickens. I don't know where the line is for you to make money off the eggs vs. how much you have to spend on the feed to get them to lay those eggs. But pounds and pounds of white bread or apples or rice isn't going to provide enough nutrients to keep them laying big eggs at a frequency that is useful. And usually they will lay 6/week during that first year and the size will drop before the frequency will drop because that's the way those birds are bred to perform.
Don't forget grit.
Consider buying that probiotics stuff ... maybe it's called probios ... at the feed store or animal health store. It comes in a paste for horses, but the powdered form is handy to add to chickden feed once a week or so. Some packaged feeds actually include a bunch of the probiotics in it. I don't think it will provide bigger eggs, but your feed doesn't have any in it and studies say it's great. It could be a bit of fad, though, even though the studies are all pro-probiotics for chickens.
Your feed doesn't appear to have any Vit K in it either. Usually it's listed as menadione nicotinamide or similar. If you plan to hatch eggs, chicks supposedly need Vit K in the first days of life, so you may want to consider changing feed if you plan on hatching chicks. Change feed 2-3 weeks before collecting eggs for hatching. They'll hatch, but the chicks can die/do poorly without Vit K ... or at least that's what the chicken nutritionists say.
What is up with the "natural flavoring" that is listed as the last ingredient? What natural flavor does the feed need to be palatable to the chickens? And does that flavor go through the chickens and into the eggs? I haven't seen that before and will put that on the back burner to research. It makes me wonder if the feed doesn't taste very good and so the chickens won't eat enough of it unless it's got the natural flavoring in it. Feed should taste good enough to eat without having to add natural flavoring to it, right? Or am I wrong? That's part of why we added stuff like sunflower meal and alfalfa meal to our feed mix ... to make it taste good. It never occurred to us to add "natural flavorings."
I look up Sunnyside hatchery. They appear to have good prices. Nice. Sunnyside mentioned "Dekalb Black" on their front page. Dekalb is run by ISA Poultry, I believe, so we can check out the info on the chicken and see if they are supposed to lay a medium egg, a large egg, or what? When I go to the ISA Poultry web site, though, they don't mention a "Dekalb Black" as being available this year. The photo on the ISA Poultry site of the Bovans Black matches the photo of the black chicken shown on the Sunnyside web site. That may not mean anything, or it could mean that actually you have a Bovans Black. It's pretty common for a hatchery like Sunnyside to list them as Dekalb because they get them from the same company ISA Poultry. It's no big deal. We're just trying to track down what you should expect in egg size based on which chicken you bought.
Those ISA Poultry birds are pretty much all standard in how they perform. That's the whole point in what ISA is doing. So if you reared the chicks according to the way they suggest on the ISA Poultry web site, then your hens will live up to the performance parameters they list on the ISA Poultry web site. But I certainly don't do that. I do not keep them in a heated environment after they are completely feathered out. I also only do the minimum on the lighting that some of the big factory chicken providers suggest (you know, were you decrease the day length until week X and then start lengthening the day length at week X and then keep the day length at 16? hours for the remainder of their lives?) I don't do that. So, I don't expect my hens to live up to what ISA Poultry claims. I don't run an egg factory and the ISA Poultry (Dekald, Bovans, Shaver, etc.) are meant to be raised in very exact conditions because the factory farm is trying to make a living at selling eggs and that ain't easy these days.
But the Bovans Black is supposed to lay eggs that average 62.3grams (2.1 oz) So that's a large egg.
The white leghorn pic at Sunnyside matches the Dekalb White at the ISA Poultry site. Average egg weight is supposed to be 63.1g. That's also a large egg, but close to an "extra large" which starts at 63.9g.
The brown photo at the Sunnyside site doesn't match any of the brown chickens at the ISA Poultry site, but most of them are supposed to lay eggs that average about the same size as those two above.
And just because the photos match, it doesn't mean that you have that hybrid breed. Sunnyside is probably just giving you the pics that ISA Poultry gave them. They are all similar chickens, bred for high egg production.
So, I think your main question was ... Is there anything I can do to get bigger eggs?
Get them up to about 18% protein level. I would probably keep the corn available since they seem to be regulating themselves well with it (as in not eating it exclusively). I would try to make some evaluation on the composition of the table scraps regarding 1) amount of animal-sourced protein included and 2) how much bulk of the scraps are low nutrient (for chickens) items such as rice and if that is replacing the "balanced layer feed" 3) economics ... whether any changes will increase costs and if that will actually sell more eggs for you.
You could consider marketing your eggs differently. Size does matter, but maybe farm fresh is better than size. Or some other benefit that your eggs provide even though they're not all jumbo sized. Maybe telling buyers that "naturally raised" hens don't lay jumbo eggs. That people demand jumbo eggs, but that's bigger than what is natural and it's better to let the hens do things in a more natural manner. ????? Surely, I don't know. But you could ask around here at BYC to see how other forum members market their eggs that aren't jumbo sized. ???? Just an idea.
How much do your eggs weigh? The chickens you have probably won't lay eggs the average 2.1-2.2 ounces if you have Dekalb chickens. [Edit: Comments about this sentence I wrote: What? What does that sentence even mean? I think that might be a stupid sentence. I have no idea what I meant when I wrote it. I believe that Dekalb ISA Poultry chickens will often lay that size of egg in the summer months if the nights are warm-ish, if they were reared during the chick period well (nutrition, lighting, temps, etc.), and if they get 18% protein.]
Ugh. It's late. I hope there's not too many typos in that. Will look it over again tomorrow. Almost brain dead right now.
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