How We Keep Chicken Eggs Clean

If you keep backyard chickens, you know it’s a struggle to keep chicken eggs clean.

We’ve only had chickens in our backyard for a little over a year now, but it’s been a fight to keep poop off their eggs. I mean, who wants to open an egg carton to find nasty eggs? I’ll give you a hint…not me!

Did you know that UNWASHED backyard chicken eggs can remain unrefrigerated for a least a month? As soon as you wash the special coating off the shell, they need to be refrigerated or frozen.

But personally, I don’t want dirty, poopy chicken eggs on my counter or even near my kitchen. Yuck! That’s why figuring out a way to keep our eggs clean was super duper important to me.

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How We Keep Chicken Eggs Clean

While we’ve tried several things over the last year, here is what has worked best for us. The trick for us has been what we did on the inside floor of the coop. Of course, this may not work for everyone, but it has been our best solution yet.

My husband made some frames with leftover wood and hard cloth from when he made the chicken’s run. He attached the hard cloth to the frames and we put this at the very bottom of the chicken’s coop.

Then, we bought two metal trays, similar to a dog crate pan, and filled them with absorbent animal bedding pellets {We buy ours locally}.

Now, when the chickens poop as they roost at night, some of the poop falls on the hard cloth. But most of goes through it to the tray with pellets.

And we get {mostly} clean eggs in our lay boxes. Yay!

When it’s time to “deep clean” the coop, I remove the hard cloth frames and the trays. The mess on the trays slides right off into the compost. Then I refill them and stick them back in. The hard cloth frames get a good hose-down before going back in.

Get a “tour” of our backyard chicken coop and run.

More Tips and Tricks:

1. We scrape the poop off the top of the grate daily. It falls below and catches in the trays.

2. Collect ALL eggs daily. We used to leave one egg in each lay box, but have found that old golf balls also do the trick!

3. Keep the chicken run clean. We try to keep wood mulch on their run floor. It absorbs the poop AND the smell and it’s less likely they’ll track it into the coop.

4. Feed dirty eggs to your chickens. I just throw the dirty eggs on some nearby rocks so they’ll bust, and they go to town eating them. I haven’t had any problems with my chickens trying to eat eggs in the lay boxes. But if you do, cook the eggs first. Then let your chickens dine on the scrambled eggs.

5. Expect dirty eggs when it’s raining. When we get a lot of rain, our eggs often have mud on them. We haven’t trained our chickens to wipe their feet yet. 🙂

Enjoy those backyard chickens!
~Becky