Chicken Eggs Without Shell (Soft Eggs) Problem Solved!

   I have previously posted that we were getting too many soft eggs. For those who don't know by now, soft chicken eggs mean an egg held together by a thick membrane, but has no shell. These eggs have come out too soon before the shell has had a chance to form on the egg.

   An occasional soft egg is no big deal. But we were getting them about every morning from more than one chicken.

   The beginners sometimes do this. But mine were continually doing this, let's say it started with 2 soft eggs and we got 7 or 8 regular eggs. Then it increased to 4 soft eggs, while we were getting 6 to 7 regular eggs. It wasn't getting better.

    So I did my research about what else could possibly cause this. I learned that some think adding oyster shell will stop this. But others disagreed.

   Finally, I ran across a blog post where a chicken owner had taken her chicken to a vet who is supposed to be somewhat experienced in poultry.

   Her chicken's issue was that it was egg bound. (We had had one chicken who went through that once.) And she had had some soft egg issues in her history as well. The vet explained that the chicken was ignoring her regular feed, and eating too much chicken scratch (corn). He explained there isn't enough nutrition in chicken scratch or corn to keep the chickens laying correctly. That she needed to withhold the chicken scratch, and make sure the majority of what her chicken ate was its correct formula, the laying feed. Hmmm...

   We were giving our twenty chickens three kitchen scoops of chicken scratch, with three scoops of pellets as well at their breakfast time, as well as in the evening when we are luring them back into their pen after they had been free-ranging. Hmmm... it was worth a try to reduce the chicken scratch feedings. (Our scooper is holds about one measuring cups worth of feed.)

    We kept them in their pen for a day. No scratch. Just laying mash and laying pellets. No soft eggs the following morning. Hmmmm.....

    So now we only feed scratch to them when we want to get them back into the pen at dusk. It's working !!! No more soft eggs!!! And now more of our chickens have started laying as well. Out of our 19 hens, we are getting an even dozen so far. What an increase in a week and a half.

    So now I am sharing this with you. For those of you who are having the same issue, try backing off the scratch. Or if it's just corn you are treating them with, back off of that. It is lower in protein than what they need for laying. Those sneaky chickens will avoid their regular food and just live off of the scratch if they think there is enough of it. Consider it like candy or junk food, you wouldn't let your kids have very much of it. You definitely wouldn't let them live mostly off of that stuff! So now we know...

   To see what a soft egg looks like, see my other post, 'Too Many Soft Eggs'.