You might never need to know this

but just in case, here's a little farm Q&A.

In the 3rd season of the AMC series “Mad Men”, ad executive Don Draper makes a midnight snack with his daughter Sally at their suburban home in Ossining, a suburb of New York City. About to crack an egg, Don holds it up to the light and peers through it.

“Are you making sure there’s no chick in there?” Sally asks.

“I am.”

Sally then tells her dad about a class trip to a farm where they learned why a chick would never hatch from an egg: “Because it came from the store!” she says. Don presumably knew this and checked his egg out of habit, because where he grew up an egg could indeed contain the beginnings of a chick.

I loved this scene because it illustrates one of the show’s biggest themes: America’s mid-century conversion from naïve agricultural (or Old World immigrant) society to a sophisticated urban consumerist culture. Don’s secretary/co-worker Peggy leaves behind an insular Catholic family in the depths of Brooklyn to work in Manhattan. Don grew up in poverty in rural Pennsylvania, and his father was killed when he was kicked in the head by a horse. Both flee their histories to remake themselves in the city.

Obviously much is gained in the transition from rural to urban, which has been happening for all of human history and keeps picking up speed. But we lose a lot, too, including some really basic knowledge about things that farm kids 100 years ago—and today—would be shocked to learn aren’t common knowledge. These losses—and their repercussions—are one of my favorite themes when I think about what I’ve learned since moving to a rural area.

For the last several years, I’ve been running a farm stay. Kids, usually from New York City, come upstate and get to play farmer. These kids are the grandchildren of Baby-Boomers like Sally, and they have even less knowledge about farms and eggs and chickens than she did.

Their parents (Gen X or Millennials) might know a little. Maybe they grew up going to their grandparents’ farm in the summer, whether in Kansas or China or Poland. These parents with farm experience are different from the usual city-dwellers because they are familiar with the rougher elements of a farm. They don’t mind a little manure and they expect their kids to work. They have memories of being chased by roosters or stung by bees or eating food that was raised and possibly slaughtered on the farm. As a general rule, they are more rugged.

Other parents know nothing about farming, and I find myself fielding the same questions from them that I hear from the kids.

Listen, we’re losing a lot of knowledge. Some of it won’t matter, unless the zombie apocalypse comes, in which case, come find me on the farm. I know how to butcher a chicken and I can make soup from bones and dandelions and stinging nettles.

But because it matters in other ways—because knowing things matters—because the ever-widening gap in knowledge around basic biological realities matters—I’m offering my first Q&A, providing you with answers to the most common chicken-related questions I hear on the farm.

Q&A: All About Eggs

• (Pointing to a hen sitting on a nest) Is he laying an egg?

I hear this all the time, even from parents. (My answer: “Yes, SHE is!”)

I’m not surprised that children are confused about pronouns, partly because of our current climate but even more so because they’re children. Many are still grappling with correct pronoun usage that has nothing to do with gender ideology.

I am surprised when parents say this. You guys, get it together. You know this.

• Which ones are the roosters?

This is a fair question. We have a variety of chicken breeds so it’s difficult to identify roosters just from the red combs on top of their heads. In some breeds, even the roosters have very small combs, and in others, even the hens have large combs. A better marker is the feather length. Roosters have long, gorgeous, arching tail feathers and a shawl of shoulder feathers. In general, roosters are the gorgeous ones. The hens are all business with a more economical look.

Further detail: The comb helps with heat loss, but it’s also vulnerable to frostbite. Generally, breeds that come from southern regions closer to the equator have large combs. Breeds from up north tend to have small combs and some even have feathers on their legs, for heat retention.

• Can hens crow?

They cannot.

• Can roosters lay eggs?

They cannot.

Roosters do sometimes sit in nesting boxes for no apparent reason other than that they seem to enjoy doing so. But they cannot lay eggs. Draw what conclusions you will from this.

• Can you eat the roosters?

Yes. The majority of chickens sold in grocery stores were not sexed. Male and female are slaughtered at about nine weeks.

• Why are the roosters still crowing when I’m already awake?

They’re not actually crowing to wake you up or to herald the arrival of a new day. Roosters crow for territorial and hierarchal reasons that have nothing to do with humans. Chickens are social creatures with a lot of drama going on all the time.

• How do you know there’s no chick inside an egg?

I know there’s no chick inside this egg which we just found, because this is an established laying spot and I gathered eggs from here yesterday. So I know that this egg was laid in the last 24 hours. Also I have no broody hens at the moment. But if I found a bunch of eggs in a spot that I haven’t been keeping track of and they were a little dirty and especially if a hen were sitting on top of them and looking kind of crabby and...well, broody, I wouldn’t be so sure.

• What is a broody hen?

Brooding is a hormonal state in which a hen wants to sit on eggs and hatch chicks. We can usually tell a hen is broody because she’ll hunch down into the nest and doesn’t want to leave. She also might get mean and peck at you more than usual when you try to reach under her. Also, we might see giant chicken poops near her nest, because she’s likely to just poop just once a day in her frantic runs off the eggs to eat, drink, and poop. But the real test of broodiness is when two or three days later the same hen is sitting in the same spot.

(I love when kids want to know what a broody hen is because I am a compulsive educator type and then I can talk to them about what it means when people brood. Also on my vocab list: trough, manger, scoop, and all the names of male and female animals.)

• What makes a hen go broody?

Most hens don’t go broody. Chickens have been bred and hatched under industrial circumstances for more than 100 years. Maternal instincts are not selected for, and by now most hens have little or no instinct to hatch chicks. If you want eggs, it’s not advantageous to have a broody hen—or a mother hen. It’s so cute to have a mother and her chicks running around, but hens don’t lay eggs while they’re raising chicks. Also a broody nest has to be managed. Other hens may lay eggs in her nest, and it’s easy to lose track of which eggs she’s been sitting on since the beginning.

Even worse, because of that flimsy maternal instinct, most of our hens, if they actually go broody, aren’t good at it. They’ll brood for 15 days and then decide they’re done, leaving a nest of half-developed eggs. Or they’ll actually hatch chicks and kick the chicks out of their nice nest of eggs. Or maybe, maybe, they’ll hatch a chick and acknowledge it as their responsibility, sort of. But not really. We’ll hear the baby cheeping frantically as the mother settles in on a perch for the night, which the poor chick can’t reach.

We generally don’t want broody hens.

• Then why does that hen have chicks?

For some inexplicable reason, our bantam hens are excellent mothers. Bantams are the smaller version of a chicken, like a mini breed of dogs. Many breeds have a bantam version. (Fun fact: Bantam is a port city in Indonesia, which presumably bred chickens in a handy portable size, and the name stuck.) Our bantam hens are likely to suddenly show up after a month of being gone—with a dozen or more chicks, which they’ve secretly hatched and proceed to take fantastic care of. I assume chickens can’t count, but I have watched hens waiting for that slow 13th chick to finally make it out of the brush and catch up. I’ve also seen mother hens display object permanence: The chicks will squeeze through some barrier, like a crack in the barn wall, that the mom is too big to get through. She’ll run around the barn and meet them on the other side. Amazing!

• How does the chick start to grow inside the egg?

I love when kids ask this question, because the answer is: we don’t know! All of our hens have fertilized eggs inside them because we have roosters who are always mating with them. But after that—who knows? It’s a fantastic and incomprehensible mystery. It is a magnificent thing to contemplate, like looking at the stars and trying to imagine galaxies. How does life start? How, in 21 days, does an egg go from potential life to actual life: a fully-formed chick cheeping and pecking its way out of the shell?

It also veers into politics. I have had vegans guests who, upon seeing how our chickens were living so contentedly, contemplated eating some of our hens’ eggs. But the potential for life is in there. When does conception happen? I had a long philosophical conversation with one vegan in particular. I believe she abstained in the end.

I hope you enjoyed this Q and A. File it under “Prep for When It All Comes Down.” Are there other farm topics you’d like to know about?

PS I wrote about my farm stay for the Free Press here.