A Tough Egg to Crack

In case you hadn't noticed. It's been on the chilly side lately. Ok. Maybe it's actually been downright cold. And, as a reminder - temperatures on the farm can be lower than those in town. So, that means we are tougher than everyone else. Or - at the least - we can pretend to be tougher than everyone else. The reality is that we just use it for license to make more comments about it.

A very interesting phenomenon of the cold weather is what happens if a chicken egg is exposed to the cold for too long.

We tend to 'pick' eggs twice a day. Usually, the eggs are in the laying boxes and there are often birds in those boxes. As a result, most eggs are kept warm enough until we get to them. However, if exposed too long, the eggs will freeze. In many cases, the shell cracks and the egg is clearly not going to be sold to anyone. But, whether the shell cracks or not, a frozen egg is VERY HARD.

We recently attempted to break a frozen egg by throwing it as hard as we could against the cement floor of the barn. The result? The egg bounced, the cement was chipped and there was only a small dent in the egg. It took three throws at the cement before the egg was broken.

The moral to this story? If Humpty Dumpty wanted to sit on a wall - he should have done it in January, in the Midwest.