Originally Posted by TerryH
My mother in law is still dumbfounded that we have chickens that aren't white. She literally thought chickens only came in one color/breed/type/whatever.
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Several weeks ago, I met a man who raised poultry in one of the many poultry houses in my state, back when there was such a thing. At one time, my state had a thriving poultry "industry". (Not to mention dairy and meat cow farming, plenty of other farming, paper mills, shoe and textile factories... pretty much, every single one of those sources of earning a living have disappeared, or are in the process of doing so.) Any how... I asked him what kind of chickens he raised: His answer... "White ones!" Here's a man who earned his LIVING raising chickens, and he had no idea what kind they were. I asked him if they were meat birds or layers. He was able to tell me that they were being raised to be layers. He'd raise them till they were close to POL, then the company he worked for would pick them up, and take them to the layer houses.
Given the fact that someone who earned his living raising chickens was so woefully ignorant, it's no wonder that the rest of the city folks are out of touch with the food chain.
LOL yup!!! I will do that next time
That makes sense. I hope they get more calcium then haha and hmmm, that's interesting. So what do they do with the others then? Throw them out? Or probably just put them with other eggs of similar size and color? We have 8 hens so it would take a while for us to get uniform colors too. Although 6 of the 8 lay brown eggs so it wouldn't be too hard to get all brown eggs. Harder to get colored eggs or all the same shade of brown. We have 1 Barred Rock, 2 Black Australorps, 3 Buff Orpingtons, and 2 Easter Eggers. One EE lays a smallish/medium green egg and the other lays a medium/large (bigger than the other one), sometimes jumbo, blue egg. She used to consistently lay huge eggs but now lays more normal sized ones. But yeah anyway, it would take a while to get a uniform box but with as many birds as the factories have it probably takes no time at all. To get a dozen EE eggs would take probably just under a week but that's assuming they both lay every day, they're starting to take more breaks, also assuming we want both colors. If I wanted just the green or just the blue well that'd take almost 2 weeks since I only have 1 bird laying blue and 1 laying green
My wife...the incredible cook/baker/candy maker...says that you eat with your eyes first so those beautiful brown eggs are better even if they taste the same as those plain old white ones
