The Rural Voice, 1989-01, Page 16"The Egg Money"
Counting Change(s) on the Farm
The egg money on
the traditional farm
might not have been a
grand sum, but keeping
eggs was more than just
an economic venture.
T
by Bob Reid
he portrayal of farming's
financial pitfalls in Another
Season's Promise last summer
at the Blyth Festival Theatre touched
on a nearly forgotten means of com-
bating debt.
One of the play's senior characters,
Granny Purves, proclaims that she
could save the fifth -generation family
farm from bankruptcy if she could
only get her long -departed flock of
hens back. Her faith in what a few
hens tucked away in the hayloft could
do was once shared by many farm
families.
Few cookie jars holding the
quarters, dimes and dollar bills
representing backdoor egg sales are
found in farmhouse kitchens today.
"The egg money," even at the best of
times, accounted for only a small
percentage of farm income, but it was
the buffer for those little extras after
the important items such as fertilizer
and machinery payments had gobbled
up all available cash.
It paid for the children's new shoes
on the first day of school, the wall-
paper for the kitchen, or rides on the
ferris wheel at the fall fair. And
perhaps most importantly of all, it paid
for many of the groceries that could
not be produced on the farm.
Eunice Newans remembers her
family selling eggs in 1920 when they
moved to the hamlet of Belmore on
the border of Huron and Bruce
counties. Until a month ago, she had
continued that tradition, but at 79
years of age, the three trips each day
to the henhouse for collecting, wash-
ing, and packaging the eggs became
too much.
She was five or six when her father
began delivering a canon of eggs to
Brussels each week in his horse and
buggy, for 35 cents a dozen. "It
wasn't a big price," she recalls, but the
real value of their 150 hens was that
the family could barter for groceries at
the local grocery store.
Hunkin's General Storc, as it was
known then, would take 11 dozen eggs
a week in return for supplying the
family with groceries, Ncwans says.
They actually built up a credit at the
Looking back on just
what made egg money
special, we're reminded
of how much the farm
has changed — and of
what has been lost.
store and the owner's wife revealed
that she could hardly sleep at night
worrying about the balance of trade.
"It all worked out in the end,"
Newans says, but she can't estimate
how much eggs actually contributed
to the overall family finances. Eggs
were used in the baking which
supplied the bread and desserts or
simply as a meal themselves.
"For some families, that was all
they lived on," recalls Newans, adding
that the number of chickens kept was
often directly related to how many
mouths there were to feed.
The responsibility of caring for
laying hens bridged the age gap and
perhaps made the hens' contribution
more important than the dollars gen-
erated. No farmer could afford the
time to come in from the field to
gather eggs three times a day, but the
nature of the job allowed the very
young and the very old to handle the
chore quite nicely.
Grandparents no longer capable of
pitching hay or wrestling with cattle
could tip over a hen and carry a basket
14 THE RURAL VOICE