Thursday, February 5, 2009

January 2009 Farm production

I've decided to forgo the list-style format of our egg production this year, because, frankly, it is probably pretty boring to anyone but us. I'll still track it, because, as you may know, I'm a little freakish about these things. But, I'll just track it for our family & put up the totals here. I do plan, though, to include more than just milk and eggs this year. I hope to include things like pounds of meat harvested and produce canned or frozen. And hopefully, there will be a bit more to record as the year progresses in the "sold" category as well.

Eggs collected: 559 (about an 18/day average), or about 46.5 dozen
Eggs sold:4 dozen

That's it for January! The chickens are still laying quite well. Unexplainable, but I'll take it.

4 comments:

Red Gate said...

I am curious what you do with the surplus of eggs?

Gina said...

There is actually not much of a surplus! We eat 13 eggs a day, just for breakfast. That works out to 403 for January. Then, there are hard-boiled eggs, both plain and in egg or tuna salad sandwiches. There is the occasional egg or 2 (or sometimes more, depending) that goes into baking or dinners. And then there are a few that crack (due to freezing, carelessness on the collectors part, or a wayward chicken foot) and get fed to the pigs. We have a standing request for 2 or 3 dozen per week to be sold, and fill that when we can, but amazingly, we haven't had much surplus for sale lately.

Last summer, I actually got teary-eyed when I would see the clan come in with a VERY full basket of eggs and I had NO room left in the fridge. And they weren't tears of joy! But, I froze some (without shells) to save for later and ended up being glad I did because we had a real drop in production at one point and needed those stores.

This year, we are hoping to maybe start a partnership with a guy who runs a co-op as an outlet for the surplus. All of our good friends out here have chickens too, so we are actually all hoping to maybe start this together. We shall see!

OurCrazyFarm said...

Wow! We had a measly 19 for the whole month! Cold Wisconsin winter, I guess. How many chickens and what kind do you have for laying?
It is amazing how many eggs a family actually eats when you keep track of it. Even at over 200 a month, we hardly ever seemed to have eggs either.
We have enjoyed incubating and hatching eggs, and there is a real market for chicks. It makes for a nice financial supplement to buy all that feed. A dozen chicks are worth far more than a dozen eggs. Terri

Gina said...

We are down to about 30 chickens. I need to count someday. They are a mixture of breeds from Murray McMurray's rainbow layers and brown layers. We have RIRs, Black Minorcas, Barred Rocks, White Rocks, Light Brahmas, Turkens, Dark Cornish, Americanas, Brown Leghorns, and maybe a few others. I love the rainbow of egg colors we get.

We'd love to try our hand at incubating our eggs. Right now, I don't have the willpower to start another "project"! I'll be doing good just to keep up with the stuff we've already got going! I know where I can go for info, though, when we do start!!