The Chicken or the Egg?

Maybe the farmer should come first.

Apr 14, 2024

Hatching is hard, messy work. (Photo: Andrey Dakutko)

Poultry giant Tyson pulled out of my area last spring, closing the Glen Allen, Virginia broiler plant. They left a lot of poultry farmers in the lurch. Supposedly, Tyson bought out the growers’ contracts, but I’ve heard the buyouts were not enough to cover many local farmers’ Tyson-directed facilities investments. Given the current state of poultry processing in the US, it’s unlikely that another broiler bird processor will be buying broiler birds in the region. And you can’t just start raising pigs or cows in those purpose-built poultry houses.

How can you survive and compete with those corporate giants that left you and your farm hanging on the edge of a financial cliff? The local newspaper just reported that area poultry farmers deserted by Tyson have formed the Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative, Inc. They are not exactly going head-to-head with Tyson, as they are shifting from broilers to eggs. They will produce “cage-free, premium table eggs” and sell them to Dutch Country Organics LLC (in Indiana). Dutch Country Organics had its start with mid-western Amish farmers and now sells to big grocery retail chains. As I watched children looking for Easter eggs at church, I was praying for a resurrection miracle for these farmers, although I suspect they are praying harder than I was. I hope to be sharing good news with you as their new co-op matures. In the meantime, let’s talk eggs and farmer cooperatives and why I’m excited about this development, even if I have to visit a big grocery chain to buy my neighbors’ eggs.

Chickens and eggs were an early part of my own farm story, beginning shortly after my family started Excalibur Farms in 1965. Grandad got fertilized chicken eggs from somewhere and made a little incubator to “ed-you-ma-cate” us kids. He set up an incandescent heat lamp bulb under an aluminum reflector to keep the eggs warm in a wooden box. We checked the eggs frequently and probably drove Grandad crazy asking when they would hatch. It was better than Christmas, seeing those chicks finally emerge. My older brother Albert was especially taken with the chicks. They became “his” chicks. As they grew, Grandad helped him clean out one of the three old chicken-houses in the back yard and repair the old nesting boxes and fence. That’s how Albert fell into the egg business. I was more involved with the adjacent vegetable garden, but I have fond memories of the hens scratching in their yard while I weeded the garden. Well, mostly fond memories. Chickens are omnivores. When the hens got out into the garden, I was a little less fond of them. Looking back from decades of farming, however, I realize that the chickens were probably eating far more insects and baby moles than vegetable plants.

Another family complication came with my mother’s dog breeding operation. My family was among the first to breed the Grey Ghosts – Weimaraners – in the US. In those early years, puppy sales brought in more money than cattle sales, a signal we probably should have paid more attention to. I was Mom’s number one puppy pooper-scooper. The whelping box was in the kitchen, but we converted another old backyard chicken house into a kennel for the older puppies. Let’s see, raise bird-hunting dogs right beside a chicken flock: What could possibly go wrong? I recall a few incidents where a chicken got out and lots of tears were shed on both sides over the result.

Albert’s flock was not a big chicken operation even in those days. He usually had a few dozen laying hens. It was far smaller than what prior families had there, considering the multiple old chicken coops in the backyard. Still, I remember wicker baskets full of eggs coming out of the one hen house in use. We ate a lot of eggs. Not just for breakfast. French Vanilla ice cream made from scratch requires twelve egg yolks per gallon. Baking bread uses three eggs a loaf, and a growing family eats a loaf a day. There were also cakes, egg salad, and egg noodles. Oh, and deviled eggs for church luncheons – Methodists do pot-lucks like no one else!

The abundance of eggs spawned its own art form. Mom liked to put hand-painted miniatures inside the empty shells. We would carefully cut a window into the eggshell with tiny, sharp scissors and empty it. Then we’d clean the empty shell and paint it inside. Next came nestling some miniature figure in greenery inside the shell and gluing some decorative trim around the opening. One of my favorite projects was an entire manger scene mounted on a cross, where each character was nestled inside its own eggshell. Baby Jesus was in the center and surrounded by Mary and Joseph and shepherds and wisemen and animals. Each little figure and eggshell was meticulously hand-painted, mostly by me, under Mom’s supervision. No wonder I am near-sighted! That cross won an award at a local art show before gracing the door at my mother’s physical therapy clinic. Similar stuffed eggshells became gifts to teachers and neighbors and even the vet and the doctor. They saved cash during those early years after we became “land poor.” This is where the farm makes your balance sheet look great but all the money in your bank account is just waving at you as it zooms through, from crop sales to feed and seed and fertilizer and vet and machinery bills.

Even with us eating all those eggs and crafting whole sagas in eggshells, those hens kept ahead of us. Albert made decent spending money selling the eggs we didn’t eat. Albert’s egg business model was mostly what USDA now calls “Open Production.” In open production, the farmer assumes all risk from start to finish: owning the facility, buying inputs on the open market, and selling the product to whomever is buying when it’s ready. It’s the production model that most of you visualize when you hear the words “family farm,” and it’s the model our family used for all our farm ventures over the following five decades including cattle and sheep. In the case of Albert’s egg business, I say “mostly” open production because Grandad was standing in for a hatchery, and I don’t think Albert paid him for the chicks. Albert also benefited from some of the feed (corn) being produced right on the farm. But Albert bought specialty feed supplements wherever he could get them (with logistics of feed hauling provided by Mom and Dad). He sold the eggs to whomever was buying when he had fresh eggs. Given his scale and local customer base, he was selling retail, not wholesale.

If Albert had scaled up, he may have shifted to buying chicks from a commercial hatchery and selling eggs at wholesale to an egg processor under a marketing contract. That processor would sort, wash, and grade those eggs. They would have packaged the best eggs in cute cartons as “table eggs” for retail grocery stores and sent the rest into a food-processing supply chain—an ice-cream maker, perhaps. The USDA calls this model “Marketing Contract.” In a marketing contract business model, an egg processor-purchaser and a farmer agree on product standards, delivery schedule, and pricing method. The egg processor doesn’t get involved in the farmer’s decisions to achieve those standards.

On the way to get egg-layer supplements for Albert’s hens and supplies for our cattle and pigs, we would pass a row of empty poultry houses. Those poultry houses looked very modern to me. They were long, low, and all metal instead of the wood houses we inherited from previous owners of our farm, but they were already abandoned in the late 1960s. Eight- or nine-year-old me thought they were huge. Perhaps they were large by 1960s standards, but small by today’s standards. I imagined ghosts of hundreds of chickens in there. I would ask if Albert should take them over and fill them with hens. I continued to wonder what caused a farmer to abandon that investment over the years as I passed them. A personal tragedy? Or was it an early business failure in a trend that we couldn’t see in the 1960s? I never learned the story. Those poultry houses were still there in 2021, my last trip down that road, rusted ruins with collapsing roofs, barely visible through the overgrowth, like tombstones in a forgotten graveyard of dreams.

Data from Steve Martinez, USDA, **A Comparison of Vertical Coordination in the U.S. Poultry, Egg, and Pork Industries, May 2002**

In 1955, the year Albert was born, about 90% of US-produced eggs were from open production operations, while almost all of the remaining 10% came to the consumer via marketing contract operations. In 1965, the year Excalibur Farms started, the open production of eggs had shrunk to 60%; however, open production was not being displaced by the marketing contract business model. Instead, by 1965, two other egg production business models had become significant: Production Contract (almost 20%) and full Vertical Integration (about 15%).

By 1975, the production model accounted for 40% of egg production. In the production contract model, the processor-contractor is very involved in the farmer’s decisions and owns most or all production input supplies. These may include the hatchery, the feed mills, and even the laying hens. The farmer may be providing only the land, facility, and labor – hence the moniker “grower” replacing the title of “farmer” in production contracts. This model rapidly took over broiler chicken production between 1950 and 1955: the open production share for broiler chickens was 95% in 1950 and less than 10% by 1955. Production contracts were almost 90% of the broiler chicken industry by 1955. It’s still close to 90% now. The remaining broiler chicken production is almost all full vertical integration. Growth of the production contract model in turkeys and chicken egg production was slower.

By 1975, 30% of eggs came from the vertical integration model. Full vertical integration has become the dominant business model in egg production, where a single company produces, packages, and markets the eggs in facilities they own. That company is likely to own the feed mills and hatchery, too. As of 2002, 60% of US eggs came to you via this business model. The people caring for the hens in this vertical integration model are employees of the production company, not farmers in our traditional US concept of the term. Open production of eggs by completely independent farmers was only about 2% by 2002. Marketing contract arrangements were also only about 2% that year. The balance – about 36% – came from production contracting. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any more recent data broken out by business model covering the twenty years since the USDA’s Steve Martinez analyzed poultry business models.

So what business model will the Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative members have? From what I have seen, it looks like a variation on the marketing contract theme, with the cooperative negotiating the best possible egg sale contract rather than each individual farmer negotiating with egg processors on her own. The cooperative will also have a role in negotiating with input suppliers. It plans to supply feed and birds. Because the farmers own the cooperative, they should get better egg prices than typical under marketing contract business models. I am hopeful that these Virginia egg-producing farmers will remain farmers instead of growers (production contract) or employees (vertical integration).

Cooperatives are common in US life outside of farming. You may belong to cooperatives that have nothing to do with farming – insurance, banking, rural electric, and even shopping. For example, Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is a consumer cooperative for outdoor gear and clothing formed in 1938. Farmer cooperatives are governed by different laws than non-farm cooperatives like REI. Farmer cooperatives can be marketing farm products, providing services to farmers, or supplying inputs to farmers.

My earliest memories of shopping for farm supplies are in a farm co-op. It was the Madison branch of the Orange-Madison Cooperative, which began supplying inputs to farmers in 1935. It was involved in services and crop marketing by the 1960s. The cavernous and mostly unheated building featured a loading dock across its entire front. It was in the middle of the town of Madison then. I recall the dust and mice and feral kittens and sweet smell of molasses in the feed mixing–and bins of nails. Some of those nails were huge to a six-year-old. I often entertained myself playing with those giant nails while Mom and Dad bought seed, fertilizer, and feed supplements (including goodies for Albert’s chickens). I was hoping to find the pennies that I heard customers talking about as they bought nails, because I was saving for a pony. Dad tried to explain the nail-penny system to me, why it was abbreviated with a “d” instead of a “p,” and that the really big nails (10 inches long) were 100-penny nails or “100d.” Oh, and one hundred was 100 except with nails where it could be a “long hundred” or 120. I’m afraid a lot of this was lost on me then. It was not until I was a teenager–and that co-op had moved to a new and much less interesting building on the northern edge of town–that I understood how to buy nails and the differences between a cooperative and a regular store like Sears Roebuck. The feral kittens were gone due to concerns about toxoplasmosis infecting feed, but Dad’s cat Purrfect would accompany him to shop for mice while Dad bought supplies— including (of course) nails.

I accidentally became the local expert on farmer cooperatives when I was 14. There was a national farm cooperative conference at Michigan State University that summer and I really, really wanted to see what some state west of the eastern seaboard looked like. I won a scholarship to that conference from the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, by scoring well on a test about farm cooperatives. I had to memorize the history, laws, regulations, and all sorts of farmer co-op trivia. It was a memorable trip for a teenager, made more so by my parents’ eleventh-hour discovery that I was the only female member of the Virginia delegation. Somehow the county agent who was going allayed my parents’ fears and I got to go despite their concerns. I felt so grown up, taking agribusiness classes at that huge ag school with farmers and farm kids from all over the country. It was the ultimate farm-geek experience. I had to pay it back by giving speeches about the conference and farm cooperatives to agribusiness groups back home. It sure beat doing the beauty-queen-of-the-fair thing. Not that anyone would mistake scrawny, tom-boy me for a beauty queen. As I write this, however, I am realizing how much I have forgotten about cooperatives!

Farmer cooperatives were not a new thing even in the 1960s and 1970s. The first US farmer cooperative may have been formed in 1804, by a group of Connecticut dairy farmers. In 1867, farmers began forming Granges. A USDA employee and Free Mason named Oliver Kelly ignited the grange movement to help modernize US farming. He had the backing of US Presidents in the 1860s and 1870s. Local granges became part of the National Grange of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry. “Husbandry” was the original word for taking care of farm animals. It’s still used now sometimes, but a college student getting a degree in Animal Husbandry in 2024 is more likely to tell you their degree is Dairy Science or Poultry Science or some other genus specialty.

The grange movement was initially powered by frustration with railroad and grain elevator monopolies gouging farmers who had to move perishable crops quickly to buyers. Granges also advocated for women’s suffrage, as the Order of Patrons of Husbandry reserved four offices in every grange for women. Teenagers fourteen and older could join as soon as they demonstrated the ability to “draw a plow” – that is, manage the animals pulling the plow while keeping it in a furrow. Granges took many other rural concerns to Washington. They won direct delivery of mail for US rural residents. Known as Rural Free Delivery (RFD), it wasn’t free but at least you no longer had to go to a post office to pick up your mail. Excalibur’s RFD mailing address was RFD 1, Box 36. You could also write Route 1 or RR1 (where RR stood for “Rural Route”) on the envelope to get a letter into the mailbox at the end of our farm road as long as you also put Box 36 on there. “PO Box 36” did not work—that letter stayed at the post office until the owner of PO Box 36 handed it back to the Postmaster.

We had that RFD address well into the 1990s, over one hundred years after the grange movement won us rural mail delivery. The 911 address system (which admittedly makes it easier for emergency responders and your friends to find you) replaced those RFD addresses with “street addresses.” That created a lot of consternation in rural America, as we suddenly had to formally name our roads. Before that, we gave directions by what was at the end of a road or road numbers. Minor rural roads had a numbering system that started over in every county in Virginia. Route 662 in Madison County became Graves Mill Road becausethe old Graves Mill was at the end. The many other Route 662s in other Virginia counties got different names. Google still has trouble getting you to driveway entrances to farms with long driveways, however. I’ve had that problem on both Excalibur and now Farm 2.0. But I am grateful that the ambulances found Mom during her later years’ emergencies without the detailed instructions required before the 911 address mandate.

Granges went well beyond policy advocacy for farmers. They were strongly influenced by Free Masonry, with rituals and secret passwords to keep railroad spies out of their meetings. The granges became educational and social hubs in rural communities. They introduced new farming techniques and rituals to hold the community together. Many granges adopted an English cooperative business system known as the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, a precursor of all modern cooperatives, both farm and non-farm. Granges provided farmers with services and supplies as well as crop transportation and marketing arrangements. Some offered credit and banking services. Unfortunately, in the 1880s, as the granges became more powerful, they became targets of the anti-trust movement, culminating in attacks using the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Law. Ironically, the Sherman Anti-Trust Law was intended to break up railroad monopolies, the original impetus for the grange formation. The same business tycoons who were controlling the railroads were also controlling grain and cotton distribution. Farmer cooperatives became an anti-trust target along with the business tycoons that they were fighting. An ambitious and failed venture into manufacturing farm machinery also caused many farmers to lose faith in the National Grange. More political groups such as the Farmers’ Alliance and American Farm Bureau rose up in competition with the granges to carry farmers’ concerns to Washington at the end of the nineteenth century.

Farmers finally regained some cooperative organizing privileges in 1914 with the Clayton Act. This only allowed a small subset of cooperative structures–those with no capital stock and no member dividends. After World War I, US farmers suffered a horrific crash in food prices. It spelled short-term disaster for many farmers, but opportunity in the longer term. In 1922, US farmers won additional exemptions from the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Law. Senator Capper (KS) and Representative Volstead (MN) teamed up to get the Capper-Volstead Act–the Co-operative Marketing Associations Act—passed. This Act allowed farmers to collaborate in co-operatives to process and market their products. Senator Capper presented the Act with the statement that its “purpose is to give to the farmer the same right to bargain collectively that is already enjoyed by corporations.”

To qualify for Capper-Volstead protection, the farmer cooperative must comply with these restrictions:

1) Membership - Members must produce agricultural products and have an ownership stake in their production. In other words, members are farm owners who are actively farming their land. This excludes salaried farm managers and cash-rent lessors, and those engaged only in agricultural product processing. That means the new Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative can’t admit their egg processor and distributor as a member.

2) Structure - The cooperative:

(a) must be organized for the mutual benefit of the members.

(b) allows only one vote per member, no matter how much stock that member owns OR may not pay dividends on stock or membership capital more than 8% per year. This provision makes farmer cooperatives much more democratic than most consumer cooperatives. While 8% was a great return on investment in 1922, it has made raising capital difficult a hundred years later in 2024.

(d) cannot deal in the products of nonmembers to an amount greater in value than what it handles for members. This is known as the "50% rule" and non-member products are defined as "all commodities not actually produced by members, but which are marketed by an association.” So the co-op has to make sure it moves a greater dollar amount in eggs than in, say, externally-manufactured chicken-house equipment and veterinary medicines.

3) Activities - The only activities protected are “processing, preparing for market, handling or marketing... [of agricultural] products of persons so engaged.” The new Central Virginia Poultry cooperative could eventually develop a wholly member-owned egg processing and distribution service, as long as at least 50% of the eggs processed came from member-farmers.

4) Federations - Capper-Volstead cooperatives may join together, but mergers with ineligible organizations will remove the anti-trust protections from all involved. In theory, a farmer cooperative could end up absorbing 100% of production of a farm product in a market without triggering anti-trust action, as long as the co-op gained that position within the constraints of the Capper-Volstead Act.

Capper-Volstead made the US Secretary of Agriculture responsible for preventing these associations from abusing the collaboration to harm consumers, not the Department of Justice. But in practice, the USDA refers violations to Justice. The courts (including the Supreme Court, five times) have yanked the Capper-Volstead exemption from cooperatives conspiring with non-producer processors and labor unions to fix prices, restricting members’ production, organizing boycotts, and other illegal anti-competitive activities. No, farmers are not saints. Or not all saints. You can lose your perspective on the law in the process of trying to save your farm. You’d have a hard time feeding hens and milking cows and paying the mortgage from the jail house, so violations have been very rare. There’s been only about 250 cases brought in one hundred years.

Joining an established cooperative may be as simple as filling out a form to show that you are really farming or as complicated as purchasing stock. Farmer-owned cooperatives mean that members get a percentage of profits in two forms: yearly patronage refunds and equity increases. The equity account is often used to catch anything over 8%. Co-op equity sometimes has a catch: some farmer cooperatives are structured so that only your estate can cash out your equity share, not you.

The Orange-Madison Cooperative (formed in Orange, VA, in 1933) had eclipsed the grange as the agribusiness center in our area by the time our family started farming in 1965. By then, Madison’s Burnt Tree Grange was mostly just a small, poorly-heated, shabby meeting place for 4-Hers and farmers. In 2012, someone started trying to revive the organization as a real grange. It’s listed as Chapter 957 on the National Grange website. There’s only one web-posting, unfortunately. The grange hall has evolved into a music venue and community center now, with a much better heating and cooling system – far from its agribusiness roots. Across the US, grange membership is no longer restricted to farmers, as farmers are less than 2% of the US population, down from a third in the heyday of the granges. The transition is sad, in a way, but our local farm co-op never contributed a lot to our social lives, beyond chance meetings during feed runs, and a weekday old-timers’ breakfast gathering. So the old Burnt Tree Grange Hall is still serving one important purpose for which it was built. Elsewhere, many community granges are still active agribusiness advocacy organizations, true to their roots. The National Grange has about 160,000 members now and is still advocating for farmers and rural communities in Washington, DC. Farm 2.0 is close to a grange that seems active. I will have to visit it soon, as April is National Grange Month and their Facebook page has chatter about bread, scholarship awards, and community service.

Meanwhile, the 2021 USDA census showed 1,699 active farmer cooperatives in the US, operating 9,531 locations. Gross business for farmer cooperatives was about $230 billion in 2021. Compare that to about $2 billion in 1923. Over half are marketing farm commodities on behalf of their farmer-members. The new poultry cooperative would make 1,700 – except that the Orange-Madison Cooperative merged with the Front Royal Cooperative in 2022 to become EverGRO Farm Services with five locations, probably offsetting this addition. Like everything in agriculture these days, the number of cooperatives has declined but the average size is increasing. During the first quarter center after Capper-Volstead, the average farmer cooperative averaged 371 members. Now, it’s 937 members.

Many prominent brands emerged from farmer cooperatives. Sunkist is a farmer cooperative. It once was party to a Supreme Court decision that allowed farmer cooperatives to process and distribute their products to retail consumers. Donald Duck is a brand produced by Florida’s Natural Growers Cooperative. Most farmer co-ops operate out of sight of the grocery shopper. Farm Credit financed our land, equipment, and production expenses. We sold Excalibur’s wool production via the Mid-States Wool Cooperative, which sorted and graded the wool and sold it on our behalf to textile mills. My parents joined other Virginia sheep producers to form a cooperative to sell lamb in the 1990s. At other times, we sold corn we grew and bought feed, feed additives, fuel, fence, and equipment through cooperatives.

Virginia Seed Service, sometime between its 1923 founding and its 1933 name-change to Southern States. (Photo from Southern States history website)

Southern States Cooperative was our biggest farm supply brand for decades. Southern States was formed in Richmond, VA, by 150 farmers in 1923 as the Virginia Seed Service, shortly after Capper-Volstead became law. Its first purpose was developing quality seed for its members. This cooperative is now a $1.5 billion business and even owns refineries, as fuel is a key input in food production. Southern States began to operate stores where non-members could shop for garden supplies and pet food. In the early 2000s, however, the Southern States co-op had diversified too much and was struggling to manage it all. Portions were sold off to become for-profit businesses as the co-op returned to its core businesses. Not long ago, our local co-ops and Southern States had a messy divorce. Our co-op had relied on Southern States for accounting and business services as well as packaged feed and seed. No longer. I suspect the 50% rule also forced the divesture of Southern States store-fronts as they grew into suburbia. Or suburbia grew into them. If you visit a Southern States store thinking you are supporting farmers with your business, ask if it’s still part of a farmer cooperative. The sign over the door in Amelia Court House’s Southern States hasn’t changed to reflect that store’s new non-cooperative status; I had to ask.

At the 100^th anniversary of Capper-Volstead (February 2022), data on corporate control of many farm product sectors suggested that the Act hasn’t helped farmers gain ground against agribusiness corporations. The number of farmers in the US is fewer than one-third of what it was in 1922. Farms and farmer cooperatives have increased in size, but the buyers of farm products have also increased in size. Thus, the 1922 producer-buyer size ratio persists today. In 2021, all farm cooperatives in the US did about $212 billion in business. The top ten grocery chains in the US (comprising 77% of the grocery market) did over $450 billion in food business that year. Wal-Mart ‘s food revenue dollar value exceeded the total business done by all US farm cooperatives in 2010 and has kept growing since then. An individual farmer with a perishable product who is a long way from a consumer (and probably needs some additional processing) is still a “price-taker.” President John Kennedy summarized the situation well: “The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.” Capper-Volstead was intended to empower farmers to become “price-setters,” at least to the extent that non-farm and farm-product processing corporations are. A hundred years later, farmers have barely held the 1922 line, and Capper-Volstead is under attack. I am having a hard time ginning up the enthusiasm and optimism I had as a youth farm cooperative advocate in 1974. Still, I shudder to think where we’d be without this law.

Consider eggs: definitely a perishable product, although not as perishable as, say, milk. But while egg production in the US has nearly doubled in the last 40 years, the majority of eggs now come from vertically-integrated operations that are large corporations. In one of the more nuanced attacks on Capper-Volstead, these corporations are questioning the definition of a farmer in Capper-Volstead. What is the difference between a vertically-integrated egg producer—who owns the land, henhouses, and hens and makes all decisions about the hens’ care—and an individual poultry farmer in central Virginia?

Here’s hoping the Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative can turn the tide and not get washed away by industry trends toward vertical integration. This new co-op and its members face huge challenges, not the least of which is the resurgence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI aka A(H5N1)) this week. Cal-Maine—the largest table-egg producer in the US (and a vertically integrated company) — just shut down one of its Texas operations and destroyed nearly 2 million birds due to avian flu infection, almost 4% of the company’s total bird count. The news got worse with the discovery that cows can carry that highly pathogenic disease. Dairy operations in Texas, Kansas, and Ohio report infected cows, and the virus is showing up in unpasteurized milk (hint, hint, don’t drink any raw milk!). Now a Texas dairy worker caught the avian flu from a cow, the second human HPAI case in the US (the last one was in 2022).

Next time, we’ll talk more about the hens and eggs and less about the farmers. I’ll share Mom’s trick for ensuring eggs are fresh, too.