Friday, May 13, 2011

Baby Chicks!

So here's the 101 on chickens and eggs. A chicken is born to lay an egg a day. When she is about 5 months old, she just looks for a quite soft spot and she lays an egg. She does not need a rooster to lay an egg. The egg she will lay will never turn into a baby chick. BUT, if you have a rooster with your chickens, there will come a rooster mating season. Rooster mating season lasts quite a few months. The roosters get on the chickens like all day every day. They do their thang and there is no doubt that during rooster mating season that all the eggs that the chickesn lay are now fertilized. SO, during rooster mating season, you still just take the eggs and put them in the fridge. They will not turn into baby chicks in the fridge or in your frying pan. BUT if you want baby chicks, you just stick the eggs in an incubator instead of the fridge. That's right, during rooster mating season, ever single egg that the chicken lays will no doubt be fertilized. Which leads to the questing: What about the eggs I buy at the store? So the eggs that you buy from the store: they are probably not fertilized because they come from sad chickens that are couped up in a large barn that never see the light of day and are literally living side by side with thousands of other chickens just living in their own poop. Yes. The eggs you buy at the store, even if they are the nice brown eggs that say cage free, come from sad chickens. The mass producers of even the brown cage free eggs have found a loop hole. They literally make a door in their overstuffed barn for the chickens to walk out. BUT they pour a pile of dirt in front of the door and the chickens never go past that dirt. SAD. Now, here's how you know that you are eating a happy chicken egg: The yolk. The yolk in our eggs is BRIGHT ORANGE. That's because our chickens are outside eating fresh grass and bugs all day. The yolk in a sad chicken egg is pale yellow. Grain fed, hormone induced sad chickens...







So about a month ago, we saved 20 eggs. We just didn't collect eggs for a couple days. Then collected like 20 all at once and put them into an incubator. Exactly 21 days later, I heard little tiny pecks and teeny chirps...this video is what I saw. It was SO fun watching the baby chicks hatch! Now that we have chicks, we will either raise them for their eggs, or raise them for their meat, or sell them at any point. You can buy baby chicks or if you want eggs immidiately you can buy full grown layers.