Message from Mike Mallett of Maple Farm Eggs:
I am sorry but there will be no eggs again this week, we are very very short.
We run several different breeds here and the hot weather a few weeks ago effected some breeds more than others. The Marans ( the ones that lays the dark eggs) being the most effected, they have almost completely stopped laying and gone into a moult mode. We will not get many eggs from them until they regrow their feathers.
Adding to our problems we have discovered in recent weeks that someone has been helping themselves to hens out of the houses at night. Not large numbers that we would notice, but up to 50 birds at a time over an extended period of time. Targeting specific breeds ( Black Rocks) we think we have lost in the region of 500 birds.
We did not realise because we had attributed the decline in eggs to the hot weather, its when they did not return to lay when it cooled down that we counted exactly how many hens are in each house that the problem revealed itself. These are not fox losses, we know what they have taken.
We are restocking next week with several hundred new birds which will come on line at the end of September, so we are asking all our customers to please be patient with us whilst we work through these problems one by one.
We are the only Organic egg producer left in Suffolk, so we can’t even buy in eggs from another farm without traveling to another county.
Mike Mallet,
Maple Farm, Kelsale.