John Vivian - Eggs and Chickens

Eggs and Chickens
In the Least Space
On Home-Grown Food

John Vivian

When was the last time you tasted a really fresh egg? One with a high yolk that was a deep, dark yellow, bordering on pink, and a white that stayed together in a plump circle instead of running all over the frying pan? If your answer is, I guess I never have, you arent alone. When my wife, Louise, and I first made our move from city to country, I really believed that the lighter colored the yolk, the fresher the egg. It wasnt until our first pullets began laying that I learned the facts, that the yolk color is dependent on the pigments in the feed.

You see, an egg is in many respects a living thing, even if it is not fertile which is the case with store-bought eggs; a hen will lay her quota of infertile eggs without ever setting eyes on a rooster. And in the time most commercially produced eggs spend in storage or transit, they slowly lose water. You can tell a fresh egg from a stale one easily. Hard-boil it. If the dent in one end where the air pocket was is good-sized, your egg is stale.

We think theres a big difference, too, between poultry raised commercially and raised at home. Here the difference isnt the age of store birds, but the methods and feeds used to raise them.

Commercial eating birds live out their brief spans in totally artificial surroundings. The heat, light, and humidity are all manipulated to generate quick growth. Birds are packed into the broiler factories nearly feather-to-feather.

We believe the difference is quickly apparent, that theres a better flavor and firmer texture to our home-grown chickens.

Now, does it make nutritional and economic sense to raise your own birds for eggs and meat?

Yes, emphatically.

An egg contains everything that goes into a chick that will hatch, ready to walk, peep, feed itself, and do most every chicken thing but fly. It is protein in large part, all usable by the human body. Just a couple of eggs a day will provide an adult with one-quarter to a third of his daily protein needs, with relatively few calories accompanying them.

Cholesterol is a fat-like substance manufactured by the body, and we cant live without it. Thick deposits of it are found clogging the arteries of some people, so it has been implicated as a factor in arteriosclerosis. And it is found in eggs. This has led many doctors to advise their patients not to eat too many eggs.

The answer should be between you and your doctor. If you are 35 or more, you should have periodic blood tests anyway. If these show you are high in cholesterol, your physician may advise you to cut down on a lot of things, eggs included. Most people who eat normally and exercise regularly will have no problem and presumably can eat as many eggs as they want to. On the other hand, other physicians recommend that any adult should hold his egg consumption to three a week. Growing children use the cholesterol in body-building. Louise and I pretty much keep to the three-egg rule, but our two preschoolers gobble down at least one a day. You do as you and your doctor see fit.

There is probably less of a potential health problem from chicken than from any red meat. It is low in calories per unit of protein provided, particularly if you dont eat the skin, and is lowest when broiled.

The fat content can be reduced if you prick the skin to let melted hard fat out while you fry or roast the bird. This puts you lower in calories and saturated type fats than well-marbled beef or any other red meat.

So far as economics go, both eggs and chickens rank high among the animal foods for feed-efficiency. It takes more than twenty pounds of protein to produce one pound of protein in a beef steer, but a chicken can do much better. The protein content of poultry is 2530 percent. A four-pound live weight broiler will yield about one pound of protein. It takes about eight pounds of a 17 percent protein feed to produce it. Thats 1.36 pounds of protein.

It takes about four pounds of an 18 percent diet to produce a dozen large eggs. The eggs are about 13 percent protein, and the dozen consists of about 0.23 pounds of protein. Thus 0.72 pounds of food protein produces 0.23 pounds of egg protein.

Such efficiencies by the chicken in conversion of the protein feed, plus the relative efficiencies of modern poultry management, are why chicken is usually the best meat bargain in the store, and eggs are still cheap.

No home poultry operation can match a commercial factory in capital and labor efficiency and in cheap feed production. Most people, too, agree that a home operation will be a money-loser if it is based on buying all of the chicken feed, though it may be justified purely on grounds of improved quality and food safety. However, if you can produce as much as a quarter of the birds food needs yourself, youll probably break even, money-wise. The cooking and table scraps from an average household will provide this for a small laying flock, and from that point on, the more of your birds diet you raise yourself, the more cash you are ahead. Ill go into the details of this later.

Before buying any birds or obtaining equipment, be sure you arent going to be breaking the law. In the old days, nearly every house, in town or country, had a flock of layers out back. But as America grew in population and became urbanized, housing density increased to the point where there were four or five homes where one stood earlier. Too many people too close for the normal smells, crowing, bugs and hen-clucking of a traditional poultry yard to be anything but a nuisance.

Towns grew into cities, expanding out to encompass nearby farms, and soon the farmers pig lot and barnyard became offensive to the surrounding townsmen. And into law came zoning ordinances, one of the first items in many places being prohibitions against keeping farm livestock within the town or city limits, poultry in particular being singled out as major malefactors.

So, check your municipalitys zoning ordinances.

The more space you can give your flock, both under cover and out in the open, the better. Nature takes care of any odor problem in a large run, and a deep layer of litter in the house, changed several times a year, does the same for the inside quarters.

Problem is, unless you are a natural carpenter and have a barn full of old lumber you will pay many hundreds of dollars just buying the raw materials, to say nothing of labor costs. Though a well spread out arrangement is highly recommended for both health and attractiveness to the flock, you can make do with considerably less space if you must. At minimum you should provide two square feet of inside floor space and one square foot of above-ground roost per bird. (The roosts can be two or more feet above the floor and the area under them will count as floor space. Make the run as large as you can.)

Weve kept as many as twenty-five birds happy with a little five-by-nine house partitioned off one end of the barn and a nine-by-twelve outside run but not for long. Once they reached broiling weight, all but the half dozen best potential laying hens and a rooster or two went into the freezer. By that time they had figured out the facts of chicken life, and that small space produced more than love spats. It was all-out war as the young roosters battled over the hens, and the hens scrabbled around working up their pecking order.