It's that time again!

This sure takes me back. Same scene, different season. And please, don't continue reading if you're not interested in the nitty gritties of chicken slaughter.

We were culling layers which is quite an interesting prospect since they each had a few eggs left. The challenge is to capture their peak of production (which is in their first two years) and then cull them when that drops off to maintain a profit. You don't want to be feeding birds who aren't producing eggs and while that might sound harsh, many farms have been ruined financially by farmers unwilling to make hard decisions.

We found eggs in all stages of production which was a pretty neat biology lesson. A few were fully formed and could have been eaten right then, while others didn't have their hard shell yet. The ones to be laid in a few days were simply yokes getting progressively bigger before the chicken produced the white and the shell.

Chicken culling is always sad and it's nice to do at a farm like Maggie's since there's plenty of other people around to go through it with you. We saved all of our layers for stock (and cat food!) so they'll be put to good use even though their days running around the farm are behind them.