CRACKING THE LOCAL EGG MARKET
By Don Doucette
The common egg, once a no-brainer shopping decision. A product once in abundant supply.
I worked years ago for Willow Tree Poultry Farm in Attleboro when that firm still raised live chickens. We sold fresh roasting and broiler chickens along with fowl – fowl being older laying hens beyond their prime and less able to produce eggs economically.
We had one large hen house level devoted to fresh egg production and a bustling fresh egg business with the bulk of our eggs sold from the original and tiny Willow Tree retail store, an old, converted garage behind the main house.
Another large outbuilding contained garage space for the original owner’s (Frank Moses) prized autos and along with smaller connected space where we candled our eggs looking for pesky blood spots before the eggs were sorted to size on an ingenious electric driven mechanic we called “the egg machine.”
About fowl, also called stewing hens, old timers prized fowl for cooking and taste. They were tough and usually pot simmered for long periods of time, but in the end, able to produce a wide range of delicious and tender chicken dishes. Their resulting broths were superb, the base for many fine recipes.
Bob Slater, famous for his catered chicken pot pies served a range of appreciative clientele throughout the Attleboro area. Mr. Slater regularly wholesale-purchased our fowl for his famous recipe.
The Willow Tree Farm property chicken coops sat on a gravel rise behind the original retail store and sloped downhill in the back from the coup complex and through an old peaceful fragmented hay meadow to the shore of Hebron Pond, the main Ten Mile River course. We were at that time actually a small Ten Mile River Watershed retail farm enterprise.
Now, for my point.
Nancy tried to buy eggs this week from a large chain store in nearby Seekonk. Not a fresh egg to be had in the store.
Off we went up the road to the Willow Tree. Yes, they had Little Rhody eggs in both large and extra-large sizes. I bought two dozen of the extra-large size.
I recall when fresh extra-large eggs at Willow Tree once sold for sixty-five cents per dozen. The eggs in hand this week sold for $5.89 per dozen – or, $11.78 for two dozen.
Buying eggs was once a common and economic endeavor, now, advanced strategy is required in this surprisingly scrambled and bewildering retail egg market.
Don Doucette
“Ten Mile River Rambles”