maran's people and egg color...

[walkswithdog]

I thought I'd ask the people with the breed with the most emphasis and experience with egg color about well, my problem.

My production partridge rocks lay a light to medium egg. Not a happy thing. I thought my biggest thing would be getting back to Standard especially comb/tail/size. Then I get first gen eggs and voila - crappy egg color. Since I sell the eggs I don't want - egg color matters. A creme egg is not a brown egg.

Does feed ever influence egg color? If yes what feeds do you feel work/help, these also free range ALL day.

And will rigidly selecting only darker eggs to hatch/breed from, get me better color over the long haul?

This puts my partridge rock project back a step since at this point I don't know which hens, and I have better and lesser specimens, are laying the darker eggs. I'm going to make a breeding pen to isolate two at a time so I can tell but until then I'm only hatching the darker eggs.

Any other pointers? Good brown eggs are definitely part of the criteria and I really hadn't anticipated such a huge spectrum of egg color - should have but didn't.

Thanks

 

[berkeleysprings]

the way i understand it is that you will want to use the roosters that come from dark eggs and use that one to breed back to his daughter of dark eggs .... i think ....