We are fortunate that we don't have a snake problem. We do have red and golden hawks though and they fly around after our neighbors chickens. They haven't lost one to hawks yet though as they have a large guard dog which seems to be effective.
We are fortunate that we don't have a snake problem. We do have red and golden hawks though and they fly around after our neighbors chickens. They haven't lost one to hawks yet though as they have a large guard dog which seems to be effective.
We recently just got a few puppies from a local animal shelter that we're acclimating to the chickens. We hope that'll cut down on predator loss.
What my parents did was gather the eggs for the day, wash them, then put them in empty 3 lb coffee cans, put a label on the cans with the date, then refrigerate them. My mom would then sell the eggs (80 cents a dozen) for spending money (she was a stay-at-home mom, dad worked for the county doing road maintenance/construction). She would also separate out the browns from the whites (I think she sold the browns at $1.20 per dozen). Occasionally we'd get a blue or green shell egg, but those weren't sold.
Any not sold after 30 days (IIRC) were thrown out (or maybe put into the slop for our occasional pig, or fed to the dogs - depending on if they were still "ok" enough for that of course). We'd eat some as well, but we had so many chickens that we couldn't eat anywhere near enough to keep the excess from forming, so selling them was the best thing to do with them.