An egg counter is a light beam across a belt, and the eggs it counts arrive at the packing machine, which counts them again. Belt 3 counts about forty a day more than a hen a day from every bird on it, and the packer agrees, and the boxes fill.
I run a free range laying unit with sixteen thousand birds in four sheds.
How eggs are counted, because there are two counts and they are independent.
Each shed has nest boxes that roll the eggs onto a belt, and each belt runs through a counter, which is a light beam that ticks once per egg. The belts feed a packing room where a machine grades and packs, and the packer counts what it packs, by grade, and prints it.
The counter on the belt and the packer's count agree to within a handful a day, and the difference is cracked eggs that the packer rejects. That agreement is how you know both are right.
A hen lays at most one egg a day. A flock's lay rate is a percentage of birds and it peaks in the nineties and declines with age, and it is the number this whole business turns on.
Belt 3 in shed two counts about forty a day more than the birds on it can produce.
That belt serves four thousand and twelve birds, and on a good day at peak lay it should give me about three thousand eight hundred. It gives me three thousand eight hundred and forty, give or take, and it has for three flocks.
The birds on belt 3 are counted. Placed in as pullets, counted, and every mortality recorded and removed and counted, because a bird count is a legal record and the welfare inspector reads it.
A lay rate over a hundred percent is not a lay rate. It is eggs from birds that are not there.
What has been checked.
The counter. Replaced twice, and once with a counter that also weighs, so an egg is an egg and not a feather across the beam.
The packer. The eggs arrive and the packer grades them, and the forty extra are graded and packed and go on a lorry.
So it is not a counting error at the belt end, because the eggs are real at the packing end.
The nest boxes. I have had them open, expecting to find a hole in a wall where a neighbour's free range birds were coming in to lay, which happens, and which would have been the answer I wanted.
The shed is sealed to the standard, the pop holes shut at night, and the belt counts at night. About half the extra come between two and five in the morning, when a hen does not lay, because a hen lays in the light.
The eggs themselves.
They are ordinary eggs. Same size distribution as the rest of belt 3, same shell colour, same weight.
I had a dozen from the overnight run tested at the laboratory the packer uses, on a quiet week, for freshness and for anything that would say they were not laid that morning.
They were fresh. Laid within twelve hours of the test, the report says, by the air cell and the albumen.
Fresh at five in the morning, on a belt, from a box, in the dark, with the birds on the slats asleep.
What is done about it.
They are sold. That is the honest answer and I am not going to pretend otherwise: forty eggs a day is fourteen thousand a year, graded and packed and paid for, and I have declared them and paid tax on them.
The assurance scheme audit looks at lay rate against bird numbers and flags anything over about ninety six percent as a recording error, and it flagged mine, and I showed the auditor the belt counter and the packer output and the bird records, all of which agree with each other, and she wrote that the records were consistent and that the lay rate was exceptional.
What I do.
I check the birds twice a day, I record the deaths, I read the counters.
The one thing I have changed is that belt 3 runs in the day now.
The belts run on a timer, four times a day, and one of those runs was at half past four in the morning so the first eggs are in the packing room when the staff arrive.
I moved that run to seven, after the lights come up, and I lose nothing by it except the half hour.
The reason is a morning in March when I was in shed two at quarter to five for a bird that was down, with a head torch, and belt 3 started its run, and I stood at the end of the belt where the eggs come out of the boxes.
They came out at the ordinary rate, one every few seconds, from the nest boxes in the dark, and the boxes are open at the front and I was looking into them as they passed.
There was nothing in them. Not one bird in any of the boxes on the run I was watching, and eggs coming out of them, warm, one every few seconds, onto the belt.