How do farmers control whether a chicken lays an eating egg or a reproductive egg and how can they tell which kind is laid?

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How do farmers control whether a chicken lays an eating egg or a reproductive egg and how can they tell which kind is laid?

In: Biology

15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

When a mommy chicken and a daddy chicken love each other very much they get together and cluck making more chickens in the process. If kept separate the mommy chicken will keep cranking out duds.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Okay…. who’s going to ELI5 the birds and the bees here?

Anonymous 0 Comments

have you never opened an egg and saw a brownish embryo looking thing attached to the yolk? they are all “eating eggs”

Anonymous 0 Comments

I once cracked sn egg into a frying pan and there was a fleshy lump sitting there sizzling away. I did not have eggs that day

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hens lay fertile eggs within about 3 weeks of being ‘visited’ by a rooster. She then doles out the semen one egg at a time as she lays a clutch. After laying as many as she wants to incubate, she sits on them, keeping them uniformly ~99° F for 21 days.

Fertile eggs are indiscernible from infertile eggs and can only be proven one way or the other by incubating or cracking them open. Only a trained eye can tell the difference, even by cracking and examining. Noticeable development is only present after 5-7 days at incubation temperatures.

Eggs are generally collected within a few hours of being laid, so there’s normally no danger of finding any development, as they aren’t incubated.

TL;DR:  Farmers collect eggs regardless of whether they are fertile or not. Fertilization is absolutely irrelevant, as a normal person couldn’t possibly discern whether the uncracked egg was fertile until day 8 or so of intentional incubation. They look and taste the same either way.

*Somehow deleted part of my response while trying to fix a typo, sorry!

Anonymous 0 Comments

As an additional note to what others have said, many farmers have a variety of chicken breeds on their farms. Some breeds of chickens instinctually are more attuned towards nurturing eggs by sitting on them. Other chickens have been bred to just pump out eggs and will not sit on their eggs, thus, even if they are fertilized they won’t grow up to become new chickens.

So in a way, another method of controlling reproductive eggs vs eating eggs is through the choice of chicken breed.

I know this from working at an organic farm, but even there, they had incubators to ensure certain eggs successfully led to new chicks being born.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Just collect them everyday and it won’t matter if they are fertilized or not. Hens have to sit on them and keep them warm for an embryo to develop. If you want to hatch them, you generally put them under a heat lamp for a while.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The eggs will only be fertilized if a rooster has done his job.

You can eat eggs whether they’re fertilized or not. The embryo doesn’t develop unless the egg is incubated either by a hen or a machine.

Eggs can be “candled” to see an embryo.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Farmers try to control this by not allowing the chickens to mate except in specific circumstances, but this isn’t always a perfect process: preventing chickens from mating can be harder than you might think.

As a second line of defense, they use a technique called candling to detect embryos. This involves holding the egg up to a strong light and looking through it: it’s not *quite* as simple as the process you may have seen in cartoons, but it’s pretty close. It takes some skill to read what’s going on inside the egg, especially at early stages, but you can get a decent read on which eggs are fertilized and which are not.