Chicken Egg Production (2019) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Chicken Egg Production (2019) [video]

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This is really cool. We have had chickens for 1.5 years now and they are wonderful creatures, and the eggs you can produce yourself are just so much better and more nutritious than you get from the grocery store. Makes us want to share the love: next month 150 chickens will arrive to our farm and we start selling eggs to friends and neighbours. Need to watch the other videos of the channel to get a deep dive to the inner workings of poultry.

> the eggs you can produce yourself are just so much better and more nutritious than you get from the grocery store

I don’t dispute the “better” part because that is so subjective. But how do you know they are more nutritious?

For example this study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9658713) mentions that "Providing pasture to hens yields egg yolks with a lower omega-6:omega-3 (n-6:n-3) ratio and significantly greater vitamin A, vitamin E, and carotenoid content compared to egg yolks from caged hens".

Also the colour of the yolk is a lot darker - more orange than yellow - and it has better structure - doesn't break so easily when ie baking. And of course the taste is better but then we come back to the subjective part again :)

Not all commercially farmed eggs are from caged hens

Essentially all commercially farmed eggs are from caged hens, unless either you live in an area where caging hens is illegal, or the eggs are explicitly advertised as being cage-free.

Furthermore, being cage-free is not sufficient to reap the benefits discussed above. "Cage-free" hens are generally still crowded so tightly that they do not move around much, and do not have access to the outdoors.

Pasture raised hens do have the benefits described above, and essentially no commercially farmed eggs are pasture raised except those specifically advertised as such.

> essentially no commercially farmed eggs are pasture raised except those specifically advertised as such.

This is a silly thing to say. Of course if a chicken is pasture raised it'll be advertised as such on the carton, those eggs go for 3x-4x as much per dozen!

It's silly to say because it's true?

chickens are omnivores and opportunistic predators. if they get to roam around and get bugs/worms/etc in their diet, that is actually reflected in the nutritional composition of the eggs and meat. there are a lot of high quality eggs for sale with much more nutritious yolks. more expensive of course.

free range chickens also get more sunshine and exercise, which reflects positively too.

> chickens are omnivores and opportunistic predators

Boy are they. Once I got a squirrel to let go of a baby cardinal, only for it to drop to the ground where my chickens fell upon it like velociraptors.

Has chicken feed risen in price the last 4 years?

Yes it has. We keep a dozen chickens. From 2020 to now, the 40lb bags of feed we buy in bulk have increased 25% in price ($16 to $20).

How do you deal with worms and de-worming chickens?

Mrs Stewart’s bluing. Old time laundry whitener.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2997/0156/files/MSB_Animal...

Just a couple of drops. ACV. cayenne pepper (haven’t tried).

https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/has-anybody-used-li...

What I found surprising is that there's only a 15 minute window (in the infindibulum) where fertilization can occur. But the chicken still goes through all the steps of forming a complete egg even if no fertilization happens, which seems like a pretty likely outcome if the window is so short. That seems surprisingly wasteful from an evolutionary perspective. Is this due to humans breeding chickens to be more reliable egg layers, or is there some other reason I don't understand? Maybe in the wild, successful fertilization is more of a sure thing than it sounds?

A viable sperm can survive in hen's reproductive tract for weeks [1], so she doesn't have to be impregnated in this 15 minute window to produce a fertilized yolk.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3944358/

Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks.

It's still a little surprising to me that the process doesn't abort early if the egg isn't fertilized. But maybe that's such an unusual occurrence if the wild that it just doesn't come up that often.

I expect also that chickens have been bred for thousands of years for this exact feat. There aren’t wild birds that lay unfertilized eggs non-stop — it would be too big a waste of energy.

Chickens eat a lot. They lay less without access to a lot of food rich in fat and protein.

Biology is so cool.

Every place you look there are these amazing processes going on. It's not just in rare or special situations like hydrothermal vents. Chickens have rifled uteruses, your body produces 1-10 billion of a certain cell per kg per day (neutrophils) that not only generate bleach to kill bacteria[0] but also sometimes just explode the DNA out of their own nuclei to trap pathogens[1].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochlorous_acid 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrophil_extracellular_traps

What a great informative video!

From experience the long tube is very distinguishable from the rest of the internals as it's surprisingly large in diameter (larger than any guts), thick and white.

Also the unborn yolks can be cooked just like a regular egg yellow and has exactly the same taste/texture.

Surprisingly interesting and well done.

> As the albumin forms around the yoke spiral ridges which run the length of the magnum cause the yoke to spin like a bullet in a rifle barrel

The sentence I didn't expect here.

This part blew my mind. How the spinning causes the ends to wrap and get taught which suspends the egg inside the shell to protect it.

We’re only a few mistaken research projects from Chicken Guns - Cave Johnson would approve.

We already have bird cannons: https://youtu.be/lp7uLTNiGrQ?si=HfP-goc2vLV5KzvL

Incredibly fascinating.

A department of poultry science?

Man the internet (and capitalism) is amazing. Thanks for sharing.

EDIT: Also evolution is fucking amazing. Check out the bit around 4:40 about this thing called the "chalazae".

What role did capitalism have in this revelation for you? I don't think it caused the chicken so perhaps you're referring to the Internet which most certainly was not due to capitalism.

Ah. Well maybe not in _this_ specific instance, but generally capitalism generates the incentive for people to put share their knowledge (in an attempt for profit) and that's what came to my mind when I watched this video. The the internet made it technically viable.

I'm 39 now. I remember when I was 9 so many things were just not knowable. Maybe a book exists that contains knowledge X, but how would I find about that book and even if I did how would I get my hands on the book? As an adult I believe I would know how to navigate the problem of finding knowledge without internet, but A) certainly not as a 9yo, B) would still take me more time/energy than with internet. This is the technical challenge that the internet makes possible. But capitalism creates (or maybe just multiplies) the incentive.

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