It is easy enough for you and your friends to find out if we sell more eggs than are laid on our own place. We suggest that you take this course. Club together and order from widely separate localities in large and small quantities more eggs than by your own admission we can possibly have to sell within a given time and see if you got them. As we acknowledge to no more than 100 hens we can fill no more than 360 egg machines on any given day unless we send out eggs more than two weeks old which find ourselves not to do.

-- Robert Frost, personal notebook circa 1903, p. 14 verso (Quoted in Faggen, R. (ed.) The Notebooks of Robert Frost (2006), page 24)

This exhibit contains a selection of materials on current and historical methods of encouraging poultry to lay eggs and measuring productivity. This exhibit includes historical materials about trap nests and other types of poultry architecture. The final sections include articles describing current USDA research on egg production, safety, and quality and links to the research units working in this area of poultry science.

(Click any image in this exhibit to get more information, including access to full text)