[malfist]

Typically hens slow down their egg production after a year or two of age. By that time, their meat is too tough for us to enjoy eating. Most homesteaders just keep them around, partially as pets, partially because they'll still lay eggs, but much less frequently.

In commercial operations, those chickens get turned into animal feed, typically dog food.

[nonrandomstring]

I think factory birds stop laying real young because of stress. You can buy them for pennies, and miraculously when you take them home to a nice big garden, and talk to them, they start laying again! Yea they're fun! (context: we kept hens when I was kid)

[malfist]

It's not that they stop laying, they just slow down. Why would a factory want a hen that laid an egg every third day when it could hatch a new hen and have an egg almost every day?

[AdmiralAsshat]

> By that time, their meat is too tough for us to enjoy eating.

Those used to be called "stewing hens," and were enjoyed quite regularly. You just can't cook them in the same manner as you would a young chicken. They were usually braised low-and-slow not unlike tough cuts of beef.

[Swizec]

Soup! Hens make delicious delicious soup. Meat comes out of a good soup tasting like sawdust anyway.

[liotier]

> meat is too tough for us to enjoy eating

Won't a long cooking time fix that ?

[malfist]

I'm speaking way outside my area of expertise here, but I think a longer cook time wouldn't have significant impacts.

Longer cook times let connective tissue break down and is really helpful for fatty meats with lots of connective tissue.

Older chickens don't meat this criteria, they're not any more fatty than they're younger versions, and according to google, they get tough because the muscle fibers themselves get tougher, not any more numerous.