354 
American Agriculturist, November 24,1923 
Selling Eggs Through Cooperation 
What the Egg Market Demands and Gets—A Radio Talk 
I AM to speak to you briefly to-night 
about eggs and egg marketing. Prob¬ 
ably most of you eat eggs and some of 
you produce and sell eggs. 
Greater New York consumes a great many 
eggs—something like ten-million cases, or 
“One-half is he of all the flock”—Adams 
300-million dozens a year. These eggs come 
from all parts of the United States and some 
from Europe and even as 
far away as China. 
Most of the eggs come 
from the farms in the Mid¬ 
dle West and Southwest. 
They are laid by small 
flocks of farm hens that 
are given little attention 
and are generally farm 
scavengers, getting most 
of their living second¬ 
handed by following cat¬ 
tle and hogs in the fields. 
These eggs are gathered 
from the nests irregular¬ 
ly, are taken to the coun¬ 
try store or collected by a 
country huckster once a 
week or so, and eventually 
most of them get into the 
hands of large firms of 
packers who candle out 
the rotten ones and ship 
the rest in carload lots. 
These farm eggs, which 
may be anywhere from a 
few weeks to a month old 
or more when they finally 
get to market, are known 
to the wholesale trade as fresh-gathered eggs. 
Most of these are browns or mixed colors. 
Now it happens that there are a good 
many people in New York who like really 
fresh eggs, and especially fresh eggs with 
white shells. To supply their demand, a 
great many people in the Eastern States 
have in recent years gone into the business 
of raising white eggs for market. A dozen 
years ago or more these specialized egg 
farms were almost unknown, and the scaven¬ 
ger farm flock was our main egg supply. 
To-day, in the New England States, New 
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, 
Maryland, Delaware and Virginia—in a ter¬ 
ritory within twenty-four hours of New 
York by fast express—there are something 
like 10,000 or more of these commercial egg- 
farms, with probably not less than 5,000,000 
hens and representing an investment of 
$50,000,000 or more, devoted to the exclu¬ 
sive purpose of producing strictly fresh 
.white eggs for the New York market. 
By H. B. WALKER 
Manager, Atlantic Coast Poultry Producers’ 
Association 
Hennery quality eggs are laid by hens bred 
for their egg laying qualities and kept con¬ 
fined in sanitary houses and yards, where 
they are fed on a scientifically balanced ra¬ 
tion of whole and ground grains, cooked meat 
and fish, milk and green vegetation. The 
flavor of table quality eggs is very closely 
affected by the feeding of the hen, and these 
hennery eggs naturally are preferred by 
particular people to the eggs laid by the 
scavenger farm flocks which forage their 
own living. So that the freshest and finest 
eggs that come to New York are those which 
come from these nearby commercial farms. 
Of course it costs more to produce eggs 
of this kind. On New Jersey egg farms the 
cost of feed, taxes, and overhead is about 
35 cents a dozen, without any allowance for 
labor or profit. The Missouri, Oklahoma, or 
Texas farmer, on the other hand, does not 
figure that his eggs cost anything, and he 
sells most of them for less than 20 cents a 
dozen, which is less than it costs for feed 
alone on the specialized egg farm. 
In the last two years, these nearby egg 
farmers in several States have formed a 
cooperative marketing association, under the 
name of the Atlantic Coast Poultry Produc¬ 
ers’ Association to protect themselves and 
the egg-eating public against substitution 
Small flocks like this supply the bulk of the egg. supply of our cities 
and frauds that have grown up in the egg 
business in New York. 
In the last few years a large poultry busi¬ 
ness has grown up on the Pacific Coast, in 
California, Oregon and Washington. Half 
a million cases, or more than 15,000,000 doz¬ 
ens of eggs were shipped to New York last 
year from these States, 3,000 miles by rail¬ 
road freight, or a longer voyage through the 
Panama Canal. These are all hennery eggs 
and were fresh when the hens laid them. Of 
course they are several weeks older when 
they arrive in New York, but they are all 
sold as fresh eggs. In the language of the 
average New York retailer all eggs are fresh, 
no matter where they come from or how old 
they may be. We have some very drastic and 
very foolish laws about cold storage eggs. An 
egg that has been in a cold storage ware¬ 
house at a temperature of less than 45 de¬ 
grees for 30 days or more must be sold as a 
cold storage egg. An egg that has been in 
cold storage in the hold of a ship for several 
weeks, or that has been kept at a tempera¬ 
ture of 46 degrees in an icebox for two or 
three months, is still a fresh egg. These 
cold storage laws would be bad enough if 
they were enforced, but efforts to enforce 
them do not accomplish much. 
It is a fact that, under present market con¬ 
ditions in New York, there is probably more 
fraud in the retail sale of eggs than in any 
other food product sold. The consumer who 
wants really fresh hennery eggs and is will¬ 
ing to pay a fair price for them can only de¬ 
pend on the honesty of the dealer. And this 
fraud and substitution not only robs the con¬ 
sumers but threatens the existence of the 
commercial poultry industry. 
The job that our association has under¬ 
taken is to create marketing conditions that 
will enable the consumers to buy fresh nearby 
hennery eggs at fair prices the year around, 
without any fraud or substitution in the 
transaction, and to secure for the producer a 
larger share of the price paid by the con¬ 
sumer, which is necessary to meet his cost 
of production and enable him to remain in 
business. It is a big job and it can be put 
over only by the cooperation of both pro¬ 
ducers and consumers. 
Editor’s Note— Mr. Walker’s radio ad¬ 
dress is very interesting and valuable be¬ 
cause his organization is one of the first and 
the best in the East to attempt to solve the 
problem of marketing 
eggs % through cooperation. 
Tlie suggestion has 
. often been made that the 
milk cooperatives, partic¬ 
ularly those that own milk 
plants like the Dairymen’s 
League Cooperative As¬ 
sociation, could work out 
some kind of a subsidiary 
organization for market¬ 
ing eggs. There are sev¬ 
eral advantages claimed 
for this plan. The coop¬ 
erative owns plants which 
could easily give some 
space for handling the 
eggs. The eggs could be 
easily collected through 
the milk teams, and per¬ 
haps some of them at 
least might be marketed 
at retail through the deal¬ 
ers’ milk wagons and milk 
stores. Also, most dairy 
farmers are poultrymen 
to a greater or less extent. 
However, the plan prob¬ 
ably would not work, 
mainly because it is usually impossible to 
(Continued on page 366) 
It doesn’t take n 
iBth < 
effort to get a hen like this 
