His hens have laid more than a million eggs over the past five years, but a farmer on the New South Wales North Coast has never seen anything quite like this.
Key points:
- Egg farmer discovers one of his 4,500 hens has laid a round egg
- In the past five years, his hens have produced more than a million eggs
- Fabian Fabbro says while the egg is perfect it is not quite perfectly round
Fabian Fabbro was collecting eggs at his Woodland Valley Farm recently when he noticed a specimen that looked perfectly round.
“The shell’s lovely, there are no cracks,” he said.
“There’s absolutely zero reason other than the rarity and excitement behind it that it wasn’t put in with the others for sale.”
But looks can be deceiving, and it turned out the egg was not quite perfectly round.
“Jodie, my partner, put it on the vernier calipers and it was a couple of millimetres out of being geometrically perfect,” Mr Fabbro said.
“But looking at the other couple of eggs that have been posted online, it does look more spherical than them, that’s for sure.”
Mr Fabbro said he had done “a bit of research” into why eggs were shaped the way they were.
“So birds lay a cluster of eggs, some in safe nests and others in fairly precarious positions, so the shape of the egg slows it down and stops it from rolling out of the nest,” he said.
“The second reason that I’ve found is that people say for the strength, the strength of the shape is quite strong, but it is only on one axis, and that’s from long end to long end.
“But I can’t see why Mother Nature would design an egg that way when the bird actually sits on its shortest axis.”
‘She’s remained anonymous’
Mr Fabbro said he was unsure which of the 2,500 hens on his farm was responsible for laying the egg, but has it narrowed down to one of six caravans.
“She was in amongst 450 other friends, so she’s remained anonymous at this point,” he said.
The Woodland Valley farm’s pasture-raised hens have previously delivered some other interesting surprises.
“We get all manner of eggs from our first round egg to massive double yolkers. We’ve also had an egg inside an egg,” Mr Fabbro said.
“We had the capsule egg, and we had soft shell eggs, it’s quite amazing what actually comes out when you have this volume of eggs.”
According to Australian Eggs, egg farmers produce 6.68 billion eggs a year.
Mr Fabbro said he had heard round eggs from hens were a “one-in-a-billion” occurrence, but he couldn’t verify where that figure came from.
“I’ve done a lot of research on it and there’s very little on it, so I’m not sure whether it was some social media hype that came up with that number but I couldn’t find anything statistically or scientifically proven for one-in-a-billion,” he said.
The egg’s future is yet to be decided, and will likely depend if there is demand for it.
“From date of laying eggs have a use by date of 44 days, so we’ve got quite a bit of time yet,” Mr Fabbro said.
“Social media can turn values well and truly on their heads, maybe it’s destined for eBay.
“Maybe it will end up on a poached on a nice piece of sourdough with avocado on a Sunday morning, who knows.”
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