Something I heard about eggs that might be part of the cracking issue. People buying eggs at the store were commenting about how thin the shells were. I read somewhere that in general younger chickens lay eggs with a thinner shell. Seems this would be more noticeable with factory farm chickens but might also apply to "better" raised ones. Would be interesting to correlate the age of the flock to the incidence of breakage in lime water. I have stored eggs in lime water usually about 3 dozen to a container and out of about 30 dozen only had 2-3 cracked eggs. These were all eggs gotten from a neighbor so can't really say much about the age of the chickens.
