Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

One egg takes 26 hours to develop (more or less): there are quite a lot of stages in making an egg, the last one being the formation of the shell. If we are interrupted or have a shock this process can be interrupted and so we might lay eggs that are funny shapes, or have no shell or even no yolk!!

There are 24 hours in a day and so this means we lay our eggs a little later each day (e.g. if we lay at 6am one day, it might be 8am the next and then 10am etc. Every few days it gets too late for us to lay so we miss a day. HOWEVER this 26 hours between eggs is not always totally accurate as some of us lay every day for a week or two and often at the same time of day and then we may miss a day. We sometimes keep our owners guessing...

There are even records for birds that lay more eggs than there are days in a year which means that some birds take less than 24 hours to lay one egg. In 1979 a white Leghorn set a world record by laying 371 eggs in one year!