What the Experts Don't Study... They Don't Know...

We love our local feed store.  Producer's Co-op is pretty much our one-stop shop for everything Myrtle related.

However, we had a little disagreement with our favorite fount of information there a few months ago.  He insisted there was no nutritional advantage to feeding our birds the weeds we pulled up from the vegetable garden (and the lawn... but that's another story...), and that if we want our birds to lay for as much as a year before molting, we need to put a light out there in the coop to extend daylight hours throughout the year (particularly in winter).

Most experts agree with our fount of information, and not with us.   Witness a University of Florida paper explaining the severe (to us) limits on egg production in hens, the need for particularly rigid feed control (must document their whole diet!) and the need to extend hours of daylight to maximize egg production for even 65% production after 12 months.

Keep in mind, this article is called "Factors Affecting Production in Backyard Chicken Flocks".

We do none of these things.  Our birds do get  bagged lay pellets manufactured at Producer's, but their diet is heavily supplemented by table scraps, the aforementioned weeds from the garden, and every bug we can catch.

And forget your paltry 65% production at twelve months... after 18 months, we are regularly hitting 95% production (that's 46 to 47 eggs per week, for those playing the home game)!  Seven birds, laying just under four dozen eggs a week, six months after the experts say we should have expected a serious molt.

Clearly, there are other factors involved which have yet to be studied.

This, to me, marks one of the multilateral failings of the alternative foods movement:  big science has no interest in doing any kind of serious study of the microagriculture movement, and small science has no budget to generate any kind of credible study.

You're left with anecdotal evidence.  And we've got plenty of cute anecdotes, let me tell you, but they hardly constitute good science.  We just know our eggs taste better than the grocery store eggs -- yes, even from Brazos Natural Foods.  We also suspect they are healthier for us.  Again, we haven't taken our eggs to a chemist to break down their component nutrient levels... we just "know" what we "know".  Unfortunately, when all the anecdotal evidence suggests that there is something wrong with the evidence accumulated from the factory-farming world.... it seems to us that the state of nutritional science is not much better than a series of wild guesses.

Happy farming!