From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t idau
A poultry farmer destroys Sainsbury’s nonsensical ban on brown eggs:
Here is his response on X:
Let me categorically Debunk this utter rot.
. I am a poultry Breeder. The hens that lay white eggs (Amberline/White Star) DO NOT have a lower carbon footprint.
Yes they eat a bit less and produce roughly the same amount of eggs as the Brown egg layers (Bovan/Lowman/ISA Brown) but they live shorter lives, are prone to dying suddenly when startled, a flighty and nervous and because they live shorter productive lives (12 -18mnths) vs brown 18/24mnths (both commercial farmed), you have to incubate more which is increased (Electricity/gas costs) and their eggs are not the same quality.
I breed and keep 20+ different breeds, including: ISA Brown hens and White Stars. All my hens are 100% free range, Not a single barn kept bird, I have ISA browns that are 5yrs old and still laying beautiful Brown eggs, I have not seen a White star live beyond 3yrs and certainly none have laid eggs past 18-24mnths.
White stars Lay themselves to death. They are slender birds and because they dont eat a lot, it drains their personal vitality to keep up laying the eggs you want to sell because of the nonsensical lie that they are “More Carbon Neutral”
You want to know about eggs, come talk to someone like me, Don’t rely on some hairbrained imagination of a buyer who’s trying to squeeze the profit margin for a few extra pennies at our expense and to the poor hens detriment.
I suspect that Sainsbury’s ban has more to do with the fact that breeds such as White Star need less feed, and are therefore cheaper to produce, thus enabling Sainsbury’s to squeeze a little more profit out of the farmer.
What a bunch of White Egg Supremists. Brown Eggs Matter!
Good yolk.
It might also be considered Henocide.
More likely than White Star hens being more sustainable would be the simple elimination of half the food supply through the extinction of species (brown egg layers). Less beaks to feed, less food to grow!
Dancing angels on pin heads
Sainsbury’s. It keeps the riff-raff out of more classy supermarkets such as Waitrose. So it does have a purpose other than pure virtue-signalling. And this is precisely what it is. But then given the current government it’s hardly surprising. What’s more surprising is how few have joined in thus far.
It’s a staunchly Labour family and business.
Baron Sainsbury was created in 1962 for Alan Sainsbury in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. There have been two other peers with the surname “Sainsbury” who included their surname as part of their titles; all are from the Sainsbury family, namesake of the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s.
I shop at Lidl, they pulled the rug from under the smug Sainsbury operation.
The Tweet seems to imply that White Star are more expensive due to a shorter productive life-span, I suspect the real reason is dodgy carbon accounting rules that include some carbon costs, but ignore others, with the upshot that it looks like they’re reducing their carbon footprint, without achieving anything.
See also solar panels (especially in the UK), offshoring of emissions from manufacturing to China, etc.
There are no tweets.
Chickens don’t tweet, they cluck.
The humans in the UK exhale ca. 70 million kg of CO2 everyday. To this should be added all the CO2 exhaled by pets and by commercial animals. The amount CO2 exhaled by the chickens is a mere drop in a very large bucket.
Those are all CO2 neutral.
👍 thanks a lot.
My chicken are no more but my knowlege remains, feels good to have it confirmed.
Chicken start to lay eggs at about 18 weeks.
If those white stars get only 15 month old
while the brownies reach 21 month on average(and keep on laying eggs till the end while the white stars stop doing so after 18month ),
then the Brownies should be more ” climate friendly”,
as they lay eggs for almost 1.5 years while the whities don’t even lay eggs for 12 months.
Which means whities don’t lay eggs for almost 1/3 of their lifespan,
while Brownies don’t lay eggs for 1/5 of the time.
On top of that one needs to breed 8 generations of whities in a decade,
but less than 6 of the brownies.
Brownies should be way more climate neutral.
What do you say as former chicken expert?
Far from calling me an expert: you’re absolutely right. Not to mention that old races don’t require vets nor medicine. The weak die, the survivors pass on strong genes. Lost over 50% of my first incubator hatched batch, next year I was lucky to get a breeding hen and from there on mortality dropped to below 15%.
You can’t fight beat nor outsmart nature, period.
And all of this in the name of Climate Change? How dumb can you get as a supermarket to promote white eggs only because they’re supposed to have a lower carbon footprint! It’s amazing considering that some people believe brown eggs are healthier and would prefer to by those over white eggs. I guess the question really is which came first the brown egg or the white egg?
Just wait until they start giving chicken food to reduce their farts 🙂
Most eggs btw start out white, therefore it is likely that the first egg was released without additional additives/extras = white.
I’m surprised there aren’t any activists out there screaming racism. 😉
The UK keeps going deeper into the ‘carbon’ paranoia while the rest of the world is backing off. Talk about going with a whimper and not a bang.
Do an images search for “chickens that lay colored eggs”
In addition to white and brown shells, there are blue, green, pink, and speckled. The names include, but are not limited to, Ameraucana, Olive Egger, Welsummer, and Barnevelder. Next, there are speckled eggs of various colors. Turkey eggs are normally speckled.
The experts at Sainsbury are going to need a larger spreadsheet.
Morrisons and Waitrose have confirmed they’ll keep stocking brown eggs, insisting customers should have the option to choose.
So far it’s a minority of one.
Don’t forget Easter eggs.
Apart from writing this rant-ette I refuse to spend any more mental energy on this topic.
My initial reaction was “claptrap”. But then on Farming Today on Radio4 this morning there were two plausible-sounding pundits saying Sainsbury’s claim stands up to scrutiny, citing some stats (e.g. modern commercial breeds now consume 2/3rds as much feed as they used to). I don’t know what to think about the numbers now, and as I say, I refuse to spend more time thinking about it.
Maybe there is some difference. Maybe there is no offsetting difference (e.g. consumers buy more eggs ‘cos they’re smaller). I don’t care. White eggs could be entirely CO₂-free. I still drove my car fifteen minutes to get to the supermarket, and I ain’t eating them raw.
Look elsewhere for your virtue.
Farming Today, Radio4, BBC. Need I say more?
I should add that here in South Devon we have a local egg supplier who delivers them to our doorstep on a fortnightly basis. All the eggs are very large brown ones. Price? £2.00 per half dozen box. The best i’ve ever tasted.
As they are delivered before 7 AM (just in case i’m not up) I leave the empty cartons from the previous delivery out in a plastic bag for him, together with the cash. Perfect.
I live in southern Vermont, there are a lot of households which sell eggs here ($5/doz). In the winter they have to heat the coop or the birds stop laying. Heat is usually provided by wood stove which requires a fence to separate all the flammable material (including the birds) from the hot stove…
Well, they could sell roast chicken too…
The last two boxes of eggs we purchased were white shelled, these were not from Sainsbury’s but Aldi, which suggests they’re cheeper to purchase than brown shelled eggs.
A few years ago I had 6 eggs with double yokes from a one dozen egg carton. What are the odds? Seems that it must have came from one chicken that somehow produced double yokes.
“double yokes”
Very very funny ! 😉
Pullets just starting to lay quite often lay double-yolks. They tend to settle down within a couple of weeks.
Your carton might have come from a new batch of pullets which had been brought in to replace old hens which had stopped laying.
Eggs is eggs. Poultry science research basically shows that there is practically no nutritional difference between white and colored eggs, caged versus cage-free versus free range eggs, organic eggs versus conventional, or among different breeds. All other factors held equal among these comparisons, the largest variable affecting egg quality is the feed.
Clever marketing, unsubstantiated claims, and supposed environmental concerns convince some people who have money to burn that they should be willing to pay far higher prices for varieties that are otherwise essentially nutritionally the same.
The problem here is much the same as many environmental topics. When you dig deeper, the topic is much more complex than one imagines. Climate and environment, which like the topics of human health and nutrition, are unimaginably complex. This renders these topics ripe for abuse and misinformation. In prior centuries, traveling hucksters selling miracle elixirs prayed on the unwitting or suffering public. They were called “snake oil salesmen”. As we all know at WUWT, battling the climate hucksters becomes a game of whack-a-mole.
Sainsbury – lots of crack heads? I bet they are not all they are cracked up to be…
wind egg