Dark EGG Color

Just wondering what everyone feeds their chickens to make their eggs dark brown. It seems that their is certain feed that is better than others. Just wondering if anyone has any suggestions....

Are you talking about the egg shell? Egg shell color is determined by the chicken, not so much the feed. Dark yolks are contributed to by feeding lots of fresh veggies and the free-range-lifestyle.

Dark egg shell breeds are ones like welsummers, barnevelders, pennedescenda's, and marans to name a few.

Yup, the color of the shell has pretty much nothing to do with what they eat. you can contribute to the yolk color, thats it.

HI, just confused then since I bought about 30 regular brown layers a couple of weeks ago. For the first 2 weeks the eggs were an amazing beautiful brown color and they have been getting lighter every day. From a super dark brown to now a light beige and lots of them have the little reddish spots all over them that come off when I wash them. My egg customers are so disappointed that their brown eggs are gone! What am I doing wrong? THey get lots of fresh greens and free ranging.

andrewsbrightbirds@yahoo. wrote:HI, just confused then since I bought about 30 regular brown layers a couple of weeks ago. For the first 2 weeks the eggs were an amazing beautiful brown color and they have been getting lighter every day. From a super dark brown to now a light beige and lots of them have the little reddish spots all over them that come off when I wash them. My egg customers are so disappointed that their brown eggs are gone! What am I doing wrong? THey get lots of fresh greens and free ranging.

When hens first start laying in their laying cycle their eggs will be darker. It fades over time. Just a natural thing, nothing that can be done unfortunatley

also remamber the more you wash on a brown egg it will take the color off
try it you will be surprised
they will be a very light tan to almost white

appway wrote:also remamber the more you wash on a brown egg it will take the color off
try it you will be surprised
they will be a very light tan to almost white

Yup! If you scrub them alot with like a scrunge or something, they completley change color. Mine lay ones with spots too. Youre not supposed to SCRUB eggs, just gently run them under tempid water, never letting them sit in water. My spots stay on cause I dont scrub them off. If you wash them for too long or too hard you can force bacteria into the eggs because egg shells are very porous.

Uh..., that's not true at all. The part about feed having nothing to do with egg shell colour, that is.
The egg shell colour is a result of many things. One, largely to do with diet! The commercial brown egg laying chicken's egg colour is manipulated by their feed. That is why in the stores they charge so much more for brown eggs!
I replace my layers every year by either hatching them myself or buying replacement "ready to lays" directly from a commercial egg farm. The birds that come from the the commercial farm that have already started to lay always produce a dark egg. The ones that start a bit slower (a week or so later), always produce the same colours as my own hatched birds do. The birds that are already laying when they arrive tend to loose that commercial colour real fast (with in a few days to a week).
I have asked the commercial farm about this and their response was that their ration formula is made up by the company who they sell the eggs under. And in fact, it (the bird feed) is designed to produce a dark colour egg. Unfortunately, they could not (or would not) tell me what it is that makes their egg shells darker. I am still trying to track down the feed formula that makes the eggs that brown myself!
Personally though, I like the different shades and hughes of colours my birds lay! I just find egg shell colour interesting.

first of all it is obveious to me that the warrenty has just expired on your layers. Second of all...there is something that you can feed a dark egg layer that helps darken their eggs . It is cold... yes cold. Ask Shannon (Arctic Sun) . She had her BCM (same line as mine) in an unheated coop last winter but insulated and I had mine in a very warm coop abouit 20 degrees celcius all winter. Mine slowly got lighter even though they were very dark in the fall and early winter but by spring they were looking pathetic now on the other hand Shannon gave her BCM's cold air and good feed and when we both showed up at the Red Deer sale in the spring her eggs were much much darker than mine were so some people at the show asked why because they knew that her line was the same as mine and my reply was ,..."I bet that her hens didn't lay eggs all winter ".Later Shannon confirmed that her hens didn't lay all winter. So here is the scoup. Dark egg layers color the egg after they build it sililar to a car going through a factory and once it has been put together then the car passes through a paint booth and the car is sprayed to the desired color. The hen continues to build up stock of the color pigment even when they are not laying eggs and so when the hen begins to lay the egg in the spring it is really dark depnding on the color of the pigment and the amount of it . On the other hand if you keep your coop so warm that you dark egg laying hen keeps on laying all winter long they will run out of pigment eventually and you will see the egg slowly get lighter and that is why they say that when the hen molts and stops laying for a while that when she decides to start laying agian the eggs are dark once again. Now production birds are probably not of the dark egg breeds but may have some of their genes bred into them. When you break the shell of a regular breed (not a dark egg breed) you will see that the color of the egg shell is the same on the inside as it is on the outside just like the blue egg from an Ameraucana so maybe with those breeds or crosses of birds they can alter their egg color by diet but that would make me wonder what chemical they may have put into their birds to enhance the egg color. Just some thoughts.

I forgot to mention that when you break the egg of a dark egg layer the egg shell color on the inside is a whole lot lighter than on the outside. A non dark egg layer will create the color of the shell at the same time that she is building the egg shell and does not color it afterwards. There is a good chance that Dark Wing Duck is correct about production birds but it really does scare me that they won't disclose what they feed their birds.

The proper diet will encourage a dark egg layer to have a darker, more even coloured egg. It will not make a regular brown egg layer into a dark layer. Diet can also aid to encourage the speckles in an egg to 'spread' to cover the whole egg. Basically it just helps the 'painting' system to work better.
I will have to stretch my memory, but I beleive greens and some oily food help.

I have heard that canola oil added to a wheat and mineral chop might help with the darker eggs from the commercial farms. Maybe some one else can confirm this.

Lots of evidence out there that Bacillus subtilis spores, as a feed additive, darken brown eggs.
For example:
http://www.calsporin.com/english01/articles/art00900.html

Wow this is very interesting! I didn't think that diet could have anything to do with shell colour...good info dan, dwd!!

I think it's important to remember that you won't be making an ISA brown lay marans eggs, regardless of what you feed them. However, it's interesting that feed can contribute to darker eggs. I wonder if feed manipulations can alter the blue egg shells, also? Darker blue? Neat

I'd rather feed my birds a little canola oil on wheat/minerals then something I can't pronounce the name of. I'm not much for giving them "additives" other then regular old veggies and high quality feed.

Lots of evidence out there that Bacillus subtilis spores, as a feed additive, darken brown eggs.
For example:
http://www.calsporin.com/english01/articles/art00900.html

Perhaps - but it's not available in Canada. This is from an e-mail reply that I received in September.

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At this time Calsporin is not cleared for use in livestock and poultry in Canada. Canadian regulator officials have declared that we must register our product as a drug although other countries including the US, EU, and Mexico, among others, all classify our bacillus based microbial product as a probiotic/direct fed microbial and have approved it as such.



We are working with a distributor in Canada who is assisting us in getting the product approved for pets and we hope to be able to have our product available shortly for the Canadian pet market. We will be announcing our distributor shortly.



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So this begs the question, what are Canadian producers using in the feed to make Dark Wings egg shells darker?

Hi, the hens are laying dark brown eggs again. Just about when i was going to ship them to the auction, they started laying. It took about three weeks, but now they are laying large dark eggs once again. I few are still moulting but the rest are at it again.

Be carefull with feeding canola to (dark) brown egg layers.
I know that to much canola (oil) can give a fishy taste and smell to eggs.
I got it myself . I got a batch of feed with to much canola oil in it. At first
I did not know what was going on, but after a lot of internet search I found out
that some brown egg layers can have a genetic problem which results in fishy
eggs. And only those brown egg layers with a FMO3-gen dificienty can give smelly eggs.
I had only 1 or 2 eggs out of the 50. I got other feed and the problem is gone.
An

Giving a blue layer extra carotenoids will make the eggs a little darker as they can use the carotenoids to spare some of the bile pigments....both are used by their immune systems. Carotenoids come from, well, carrots...and also green leafy hay, shrimps, sweet potatoes, turnips.......grate up some carrots for the hens and see if it helps any. If there is enough in their diet, it won't make a difference, but if it's a touch short, it will.

BriarwoodPoultry wrote:

I'd rather feed my birds a little canola oil on wheat/minerals then something I can't pronounce the name of.

Although many bacteria are more common and natural but less well known than the hybridized and genetically modified plant that produces canola oil...