2018 Egg Production - By the Numbers

In installment two of our 2018 "By the Numbers," we'll look today at the tally of egg production over the past year.  One of Benjamin's chores is to collect eggs, clean the ones that require tidying up, packaging them into cartons, counting them and notating the number of egg production each day on a spreadsheet we have posted on the refrigerator.  We record daily production, subtotaled by month and summed by year.  The summary of egg production for 2018 is listed below:

In 2018 we picked up 11,573 eggs and that equates to 964.42 dozen.  That's a lot of omelets!  We have roughly 100 hens.  I say roughly because, those girls don't stay still long enough to count.  Two years ago we fed them in the barn and trapped them in there.  One by one we let them out and counted them.  There were a few more that 100, and we've lost some since then.

On average a bird lays 116 eggs per year.  We picked up on average 31 eggs per day, meaning that a hen lays an egg about every 3 days. Below is a 5 year historical trend on monthly egg production:

The first thing that stands out is egg production is WAY up.  With fewer hens in 2018, we picked up 1,823 more eggs than in 2017.  What do we attribute that to?  Nutrition.  During the springtime, the hens find nutrition out in the pasture.  A change we made in 2018 was to begin supplementing the rough and milled rice we feed them with a little bit of laying pellets to add some protein to their diet.
The results were startling.  You'll notice that in 6 of the 12 months of the year, production was up month over month.  Most of the gains in production took place in January and February.  Overall April is the biggest month of production.  Spring grass and nutrition is at its peak and the weather is perfect without any stresses on the birds.  January is the lowest production month of the year due to short days and little nutrition on the pasture.

What do we do with all those eggs, you might be wondering?  Well, we eat a bunch of them.  Of those we don't eat, we give away about half of them and sell the remainder.