2019 Egg Production By the Numbers

Last week we summarized cumulative rainfall totals for 2019 that fell at our little farm three miles north of Jennings, Louisiana.  We also do the same thing with egg production.  For seven years we've written down the numbers of eggs we pick up each day.  First, it was Russ' job and then Benjamin's to gather eggs and record daily production. Now, we're experiencing the empty nest syndrome (pardon the pun), since it is just Tricia and me at the house, we gather eggs and record egg production daily.

So let's take a quick look at monthly and yearly egg production compiled since 2013:

Although we haven't counted the number of chickens in a few years, Tricia and I estimate that we have around 90 laying hens.  The number of hens we have vary over the years and that is one of the variables regarding the number of eggs we pick up.  We haven't added any new pullets to the flock in several years, resulting in the age of our flock becoming older and that results in fewer eggs.  We've lost a few hens to predators and old age, too.

As far as trends go, you can see that, once again, April is the best month for egg production on our farm.  The weather is nice - not too cool and not too hot.  Comfortable, non-stressed chickens lay more eggs.  There is also fresh, green vegetation growing in April and that yields more eggs as nutrition in better.  December is, once again, the poorest month for egg production.  Shorter days and a lack of fresh green vegetation diminishes the eggs we collect.  To alleviate this, we could leave lights on in the hen house and get more eggs, but we've decided against that.

In 2019 we picked up 8,446 eggs or 703.83 dozens.  Since we've been raising hens, we have gathered 64,422 eggs or 5,368.50 dozens.  That's a lot of eggs!  What do we do with all of them?  Well, we eat a bunch of them, we sell a bunch of them, and we give a bunch of them away.  They are delicious and nutritious.

Here is a summary of 2019 Egg Production by month:

The last thing is kind of interesting.  We have 90 hens.  They lay almost 94 eggs per bird per year.  We collect, on average, almost two dozen eggs per day.  The hens lay 0.26 eggs per day or put another way, the hens lay an egg every 3.89 days.  All these egg production numbers were skewed low this year as we did not count all the eggs that were broken by the egg eating chicken.  January 2020 egg production numbers are already markedly higher since we put her in the freezer.