Germany celebrates Easter in a big way. Shops across the country are decked out with colorful window displays and baskets full of chocolate eggs, Easter bunnies and multicolored painted eggs.

Traditionally, families get together and create colorful painted eggs that they then use to decorate the house or hang from a special Easter tree. But while egg decorating can be big fun for families, there is another group that is particularly glad for the practice: farmers.

White ears, white eggs

"Egg painting is a great tradition. Especially for the farmers!" said farmer Georg Duenn, who runs a small chicken farm in Frechen on the outskirts of Cologne.

At 300 hectares (740 acres), Duenn's farm, Gut Clarenhof, is considered small. He has six barns of chickens and each barn holds around 1800 hens.

Known as "Chicken George" to his friends, Duenn says his farm produces around two million eggs a year. This meets only a tiny fraction of the demand for eggs in Germany - where an estimated 214 eggs were eaten per person in 2009.

The barns at Gut Clarenhof hold a mix of white and brown hens. So does the color of the hen correspond with the color of the egg?

"You have to look at the ears of the hen," said Duenn. "The white hens normally have white ears and white ears mean white eggs. The brown hens have red ears and that means they lay brown eggs."

Around Easter in Germany, white eggs outsell brown ones, for reasons clear to anyone who has spent time dying eggs.

"We're certainly selling more white eggs. I think people buy them to paint or color and the white ones take the color better," said Anna Selbe, who runs an egg stall at the busy Cologne farmers market.

No more laying cages in Germany

Across Europe, eggs are graded based on how they are farmed, on a scale of zero to three. Zero is an organic egg, one is a free-range egg, two a barn egg, and three is an egg from a hen kept in an industrial laying cage, also known as a battery cage.

As of January 2010 battery cages, which are widely considered to be inhumane, have been banned in Germany. They will be banned Europe-wide by 2012. However, according to the German Animal Welfare Foundation, the fight for animal rights is not over yet.

"The egg industry had to change, but nevertheless a different type of cage has been introduced," says Marius Tuente, spokesperson for the German Animal Welfare Foundation. "The so-called Kleingruppenhaltung is used in some regions of Germany, and if the courts allow, it may be used across the country," he told Deutsche Welle.

The kleingruppenhaltung is a cage which holds several birds, and although it gives them some room to move around, Tuente says it is "not good enough." An additional problem is that in order to meet the demand, eggs are being imported from other countries such as the Netherlands, where battery cages are still allowed.

Tuente says another issue which comes up at this time of year is the uncertain provenance of pre-painted Easter eggs that can be bought in just about every German food shop. These eggs do not carry labels to say what type of egg has been used.

The rise of the pre-painted egg

"Factories do not have to label what kind of egg they use, also in egg products like pasta, so the consumer does not have the right information," said Tuente.

A big part of farmer Duenn's Easter output are these pre-painted eggs, which look like giant, multicolored marbles.

After collecting up the fresh eggs, he sends them off to a separate company that specializes in boiling and then spray-painting the eggs. The work costs around three cents per egg, and the result can be found in shops and markets all over Germany.

But what, if anything, does the abundance of pre-painted eggs indicate about the future of egg painting in the home? Is the end of a tradition at hand?

Not quite, Duenn says. But it does indicate something about modern-day Germans: "The pre-painted eggs are good because the Germans are lazy. Well, lazy painters anyway!"

Author: Catherine Bolsover
Editor: Jennifer Abramsohn