April 21, 2023
A hen lays roughly 275 eggs a year for the first few years of her life and then becomes more sporadic as time goes on. (Don’t we all?) Many farmers will retire the older hens to the stew pot, but we keep them around. It’s a fine line between free ranging and free loading, but we do our best to not keep track. We have plenty of room and I think chickens more than earn their keep even if they don’t lay as many eggs anymore. They spend their days scratching up leaves, aerating and fertilizing the soil, and eating an abundance of ticks and flies.
Age, health, nutrition, and stress all have an effect on egg productivity- but nothing has more of an impact than daylight length. Chickens are smart enough, hormonally speaking, to not want to raise chicks in the winter so they lay very few, if any eggs, until the days start getting longer. They need 16 hours of daylight for their egg laying hormones to really kick in, and to produce the maximum number of eggs. Leaving a light on in the coop, to mimic those 16 hours of daylight definitely helps, but for whatever reason it’s just not the same as sunshine.
With no light on in our chicken coop during the winter months, we might get one egg a day, in total from our 50 hens.
With a light on in the coop for 16 hours a day, during those same winter months, we might get 8 eggs a day in total.
Now that we have 13 hours of genuine daylight, we reliably get 40 eggs a day.
As Abraham Lincoln might have said if he was talking about chickens, and not people;
“You can fool some of the chickens all of the time, and all of the chickens some of the time but you cannot fool all of the chickens all of the time.”
There’s just something special about sunshine, and there’s really no substitute.