How does diet effect eggs?

[JimWWhite]

ChookChick wrote:

She could also experiment with adding greens to their diet, and see how that affects egg color. Hens with a high proportion of greens, such as grass, supposedly have much darker orange yolks.

I agree completely. We planted a fall garden this year for the first time and I put in about forty or so lettuce plants, mostly romaine and bibb. I remove the outer leaves and chop those up for my Gals who think it's Manna from Heaven. Usually I let them out just before dusk and toss out a large bowl of chopped greens and they gorge themselves on it. Their eggs all have nice high, dark yellow yokes. I just took the last of the lettuce out yesterday so today I cut several collard plants and did the same thing. I didn't think they'd go for the collards but they gobbled the chopped leave down like it was some kind of delicacy tossed to them by the gods. And I've got lots of collards. More than I can use so they'll have greens well into January.

Oh, and I also heard or read somewhere that marigolds would make their yokes richer too.

Pigs with Feathers, that's what they are...​

 

[Nancy's girls]

Great idea. We just got a half foot of snow yesterday with more to come all week. We did notice in the summer when they were free range in the garden their yolks were lovely and they were very happy, especially when they were allowed in the tomato patch. I may have to run to the market considering snow probably does not produce the same effect and all the plant are buried and frozen.

 

[NYREDS]

It doesn't effect eggs but it may affect them.

 

[MontanaMomma]

My chickies are free range, but we recently moved to a newly built home with no grass in the yard (we'll be busy this spring!) Before everything froze and died I'd go to the field and pick weeds for them and also got them dried alfalfa. When they only get pellets their yolks are DEFFINATELY lighter and the whites get runnier. Now that we are under snow, they still get alfalfa to pick through and yolks are nice and orange, whites are thick. We also feed them scraps, but I've never noticed an odd flavor, but mine get a pretty good variety of things- pellets and alfalfa the only constants. Can't wait to get some grass for them this spring!

 

[Lazy J Farms Feed & Hay]

Is this for a simple project or for the Science Fair at school?

I have judged numerous Science Fairs and have been disappointed by the woeful lack of measureable inputs. Please ensure that you use repeatable measures like: 4 ounces of carrots tops, or 30 minutes of extra light, etc. Also ensure that you are consistent with the treatment, if you start with carrot tops stick with carrots tops.

I don't like the suggestion of comparing Crude Protein levels of feeds unless you have an accurate measure of the Lysine and Methionine content of the feed.

A nice experiment would be comparing the Laying Production of Hens fed two diets containing identical Lysine and Methionine content but with different Crude Protein levels. The Hypothesis would be: Excess crude protein improves laying hen performance. The Response Criteria would be:

Laying Efficiency (lb feed/dozen eggs)
Egg Production (eggs/day or month)
Egg Mass (total weight of eggs)
Egg Size (average egg weight)

Of course to conduct a valid experiment you would need to have replicates of the treatments which is probably not feasible so I would do a switch-back experiment where the hens consume one treatment for a set period of time then switches to the other. In essence each groups serves as their own Control.

Jim

 

[Nancy's girls]

The project is done. I let my daughter and her friend figure out and run the project and here is what they came up with. They ended up separating our flock into three groups, control, garlic and onion. The garlic and onion hens were always given a bit of garlic or onion powder on what ever food they were given. Most of the time we stuck with their feed. We did this for about a month. I didn't taste test the eggs myself. The school kids did. They said that over the month the garlic and onion eggs began to taste bad, especially the garlic. After the month was over the garlic hens were pretty sick of garlic flavored food. The onion hens still liked theirs. Our lesson is that a bit of onion and garlic here and there isn't too bad, but consistently feeding lots of onion and garlic will give the egg yolks a bad taste. We added 1 tsp garlic or onion powder per cup of feed (that is quite a bit!).

 

[digitS']

Nancy's girls :

. . . We added 1 tsp garlic or onion powder per cup of feed (that is quite a bit!).

 

[Akane]

Hmmm... might want to do more research before allowing future experiments. Some animals lack the enzyme to digest garlic and onion properly. It then damages red blood cells. Over time it can cause anemia and death. We sort of discussed in the feeding section whether chickens are susceptible. There's not really easy to find info about chickens and environmentally caused hemolytic anemia. While I don't think they are susceptible and you kind of proved they can fully digest it you could have killed a bunch of chickens proving it wrong or right. That would not have been a good end to an experiment.

 

[Nancy's girls]

I thought that we had researched before hand. We had to get clearance from a vet as well before we could do the project. I am VERY glad we did not hurt our girls. BYW, my daughter took first place at the science fair.

 

[lovinlife]

Quote:
I'm kinda curious about how you know the eggs tasted like grasshoppers...