Crunching the Numbers

Hi All

Some of you may have noticed the nice little graphs at the top and bottom of this page detailing our egg production. These tend to be more or less accurate, depending on how timely I am in entering the daily production. Sometimes it's an up-to-the-minute accounting of production. Other times, it may be just the teeniest bit behind - Like a week or so... At any rate, the total numbers are close enough to give a good feel for how things are going.

I must admit I was a little concerned about the lower graph - The one showing monthly totals since the girls started laying. It has begun to look quite a bit like a chart for the value of the U.S. dollar. I decided to put on my little green visor and see what I could come up with for a "real" number based on the number of hens (which has also been following the trend of the dollar!) relative to how many eggs were produced. Once I did that, the numbers didn't look so bad after all.

I took the number of eggs produced in a month, divided it by the number of days in the month, then finally by the number of laying hens in that month. No, I didn't break it down daily to account for hens that were lost in the middle of the month - This is a rough estimate, not rocket science! The resulting figure let me know what percentage of "maximum production" (meaning every hen laid one egg per day) we saw for the month. The numbers worked out thusly:

• November - 281 eggs, 25 hens, 43% max production.*
• December - 604 eggs, 24 hens, 81% max production.
• January - 545 eggs, 23 hens, 76% max production.
• February - 478 eggs, 23 hens, 74% max production.
• March - 479 eggs, 21 hens, 74% max production.

* First egg was Nov 4, so there were only 26 days of production.

So things really aren't as gloomy as they seemed. Total egg production is down, but there hasn't been a huge decrease in production per hen. Hopefully the warmer weather and longer days will inspire more productivity and we'll see a continued return to the higher percentages of December and January, but if not, oh well. The girls seem happy, we have plenty of eggs for the Co-op members, and we're still able to sell enough to cover the cost of supplies.

Matt