AAF Part 4 ~ The Chickens

Another AAF!  For those of you who don’t know what that stands for, it means Animals Around the Farm. This time it is all about our chickens and their eggs.

First, how many chickens do we have?  Umm, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… Let’s just say around 24,000.

O.o! Yes you heard (or read) right. And a lot of chickens means a lot of… EGGS!

That’s not all!

These eggs are in flats, which are on carts. Each flat holds 54 eggs and the cart holds 90 flats. At peak we get about a cart and a third a day.

But I need to back up a little bit and tell you where we keep these chickens. We keep 8,000 chickens in each house, and we have three houses.

Each chicken house is 400 feet long.

Where the chickens live.

The chickens lay their eggs in these ‘nests.’

Then the eggs roll down the floor of a nest, through the flap, and onto a conveyer belt. When we flip a switch, the belt brings us out the eggs where we put them into the flats.

Right now we are getting about 17,000 eggs.  That’s at about the peak.  But we don’t keep them all. A bunch of the eggs right now are just a wee bit too small, meaning the chickies will not hatch.  So how do we tell them apart?  With a scales.

This egg is too small.

Sometimes we get ‘doubles.’  A double egg is an extra big egg with two yolks inside.  We also get teensy eggs that don’t even have yolks. And soft shell eggs too. If you would like to see more types of eggs you can see my sister’s post HERE.

The egg on the bottom is a normal egg.

We also get what we call ‘dirty eggs’.  This doesn’t mean they get mud on them, it means, uh, they get manure on them. 😉 We use these tools to get the ‘dirt’ off.

Normally these tools aren’t quite so clean.

Sometimes when the eggs come out they are cracked up. But it isn’t funny to them (the eggs) because when I say cracked up I mean literally cracked up.  Have I cracked you up yet?

These are eggs are culls. But I think it would make more sense to call them wounded.

And I think that pretty much wraps it up! Again, make sure to check out Allison’s post HERE.  You will see many a strange egg.