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Blue eggs, or even the Dr Seuss touted green eggs, could be a solution to understanding how your eggs are produced.
A grains researcher turned poultry breeder has come up with a novel solution to revolutionise the way pasture-raised chook eggs are identified.
Currently consumers have no way of determining the provenance of an egg simply by looking at it, as visually there is no difference between barn-laid, free-range or pasture-raised chicken eggs.
Twelve years ago, Michael Materne began experimenting with a South American breed of chicken that lays blue eggs.
"I thought maybe transferring that colour to a proper egg-laying production chook might be a good opportunity to then have a colour that you could pick and use to define quality," Mr Materne said.
"The real aim is to produce eggs that are green or blue and to have those colours associated with premium, pasture-raised eggs, so that when consumers buy the eggs, they can actually visually see that these eggs are legitimate."
Mr Materne said the blue egg-laying breed was wild, only laid eggs seasonally and was prone to becoming clucky, making cross-breeding essential.
"The original breed is called Araucana. They're not very good egg layers and they're quite a wild breed," he said.
Chicken egg colours explained:
- White eggs: all eggshells are made of calcium carbonate and the white ones have no pigment added
- Brown eggs: caused by protoporphyrin IX, from the hen's haemoglobin, and is coated on the outside of the egg as it moves through the oviduct
- Blue eggs: have the pigment oocyanin, which does permeate the shell, so the blue colouring will be all the way through
- Green eggs: if a brown layer and a blue layer are crossbred, chances are you will get a green egg when the protoporphyrin IX layer is deposited over the blue oocyanin shell
- Pink eggs: comes from the bloom or cuticle, a natural coating that seals the eggshell's pores. The bloom is often washed off before eggs are sold commercially
- Speckled eggs: can be laid by any hen with pigmented shells and comes from the egg rotating slower than normal during the pigmenting stage
"There is also one breed that they recognise in Japan that had green-blue eggs, so I've basically used that as a starting point and I've mated it with an old English game fowl, which has got a lot of vigour and is very hardy.
"Then I've been crossing it with commercial egg layer type chooks to increase the egg size and to increase the egg production.
"That's probably about five crosses all together, with three different varieties of fowl."
Mr Materne said the blue egg-laying traits of his chooks have been carefully selected over many generations.
"We've had to work out methods of selecting which chooks are going to lay blue eggs, so that's been a challenge. Now we've got that sorted out," he said.
"When you've got a white egg and you have the gene for blue, it turns sky blue. When you've got a brown egg with the blue gene, it turns green.
"The breeding continues, but we've got to the point where we've got the type of chooks we need so we're looking at multiplying the chickens up this year for potential egg production going into next year."
The breeder said he will look to people who are specialists in egg production and want a marker to show their eggs are pasture-raised, organic, or to a particular standard.
"We have a partner in Canada who is definitely interested, so when they're refined there is the potential to export eggs over there.
Tamsyn Murray, who owns and operates Josh's Rainbow Eggs with her son, Josh, said the success of the crossbreed would hinge on price and genetics.
"They would need to be affordable for producers to consider the breed," Ms Murray said.
"Smaller producers will think it's a cool egg but the big guys probably wouldn't be interested. So it could naturally become known as a sign of pasture-raised.
"We would consider running a shed if the genetics and lay rate were good enough."
Topics: poultry-and-egg-production, business-economics-and-finance, chemistry, human-interest, animals, birds, horsham-3400