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Hey there!
Things have been pretty crazy around the homestead for the past couple months, and I've been having a hard time getting into town to use the internet, but I finally found time to check in with you all.
Lately we've had a lot of interest in our 'Easter eggs', so I thought I'd give you guys the rundown on the differences between them and our brown eggs.
As a general guideline, white eggs come from breeds developed below the equator, brown eggs from above, and blue eggs specifically from the Mediterranean.
The original blue egg laying hens are called Araucanas, but purebred Araucanas can carry a lethal gene that results in most of their chicks dying in the shell. After the Araucana chicken breed arrived in America, poultry enthusiasts attempted to stabilize the breed by crossing it with various other types of chickens. These out-crossings resulted in the development of the Ameraucana chicken breed, which carries the blue egg gene but can lay shades of green as well. The Ameraucana breed must conform to relatively strict breed standards in order to bear the name. Birds that have been out-crossed further and lack specific breed characteristics are a mongrel breed that people refer to as Easter Eggers.
A lot of our birds conform to the breed specifications of the Ameraucana, but some are definitely just Easter Eggers, which accounts for the wide variety of colors in our egg basket.
If you want to purchase purebred Ameraucanas or Araucanas, definitely purchase them through a breeder. Our girls came from a box at our local livestock auction, and while they're beautiful and we love them, they would never qualify as show birds.
We love the excitement of finding different coloured eggs in the nesting boxes, but there are a few misconceptions, particularily about the contents of the green and blue shelled eggs.
No matter what colour your egg is on the outside, the inside always contains the white albumen and the yellow yolk. The colour of the shell has no bearing whatsoever on the nutritional value of the egg. Some things that do alter the nutritional value of an agg are; high quality feed, access to fresh air and sunshine, the ability to graze outdoors and hunt bugs, and in my opinion, the happiness of the birds. I might be a little biased, but happy hens just seem to lay better eggs.
Studies by the USDA declared that there was no nutritional difference between caged, free range, or organic eggs, but the study only took into consideration the protein content based on the thickness of the albumen. They didn't cover vitamin d, vitamin e, omega-3s or cholesterol, all of which see a vast difference between farm fresh eggs and factory eggs.
Various other studies conducted since the 70s have compared the eggs of small free range flocks against factory farmed eggs and found some pretty incredible differences.
Free range eggs have been found to have 1/4 less saturated fat, 2/3 more vitamin A, 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids, 3 times more vitamin E, 7 times more beta carotene, up to 6 times more vitamin D, and 1/3 less cholesterol.
I feel that the humane treatment of an animal heavily impacts the final product, whether that's eggs, milk or meat. So even if there were no nutritional difference between farm eggs and factory eggs, the joy that I feel watching my girls chase bugs around the yard makes the extra work worthwhile.
And you just can't beat the taste of eggs straight from the hen house.
-Jenni