New egg for processing contract improves productivity for Lincolnshire producer
Lincolnshire free range egg producer Des Bradley has been delighted by the performance of his new white laying birds.
Des says that productivity has improved dramatically since he switched to producing white eggs purely for processing, although he says that a short break from production and a move to single age flocks may also have influenced the improved performance. But Des is now half way through his first flock of whites, and he says the results have been “tremendous”.
“We have gone from desperately poor production, from where we were before and had to do something about, to really tip top results now. We have birds still at 95 per cent at 48 weeks. We were losing money before,” said Des, who said he had thought he may have to quit the egg business unless he could solve his production problems. He was then offered the opportunity by Noble Foods to join a new group of producers the company was assembling to produce eggs directly for its cracking plant. The move has clearly been transformational for Des, and not just because of the improvement in productivity.
“What we have also found with the white birds is that they are easier to manage,” he said. “They seem to be more mobile, they will go in and out of the sheds readily, which is always a good thing; we have almost no floor eggs; there is no feather pecking; they are easier to walk around; they don’t crowd around you or crowd down one end of the shed, they stay very even within the shed. They are all little things where you wouldn’t expect to see differences but they are quite a different bird,” said Des.
Des and his family farm 1,000 acres of land at Grimsthorpe, near Bourne in Lincolnshire. They have both beef and arable operations on the farm, and he says they were amongst the first farmers to go into modern free range egg production in 1987. For the last seven or eight years of conventional free range production Des was producing Goldenlay Omega 3 eggs for Noble. “I have always liked to do something a little different and that is possibly why they offered me the chance to try the processing birds,” said Des. But he said he had started struggling with poorer and poorer performance and knew something had to change.
“It was desperately poor towards the end, even though we had tried everything veterinary. We were beating our heads against a wall in terms of results, but we had six different ages of birds among the 64,000 we had, and in consultation with vets and others we decided we had to do something to change it or we would stop altogether. There was no point in losing money onwards. One of the biggest things we could do to change it was to go to single age on each site – we have two sites 20 miles apart.”
To move to single age Des knew he would need to go through a de-population programme, so he took the opportunity to take a gap from production completely. During the eight-month break from production he carried out renovation work on the sheds and re-sowed some of the range. “I had to discuss my plans with Noble because I was probably their biggest Omega 3 producer at the time. When I asked about returning to Omega 3 afterwards, it was then that they asked me if I would like to get involved in this other project instead. It’s quite a big psychological step to produce eggs for breaking, so I looked into it in great detail, but the more I looked into it the more attractive it got.”
He said that not many people in this country knew much about white layer breeds because the industry had concentrated on wholly brown eggs for years, but he said that breeding companies had breed manuals from their work in Europe. He said he spoke to companies like Hendrix and sought out the views of egg producers in Holland, where many said they preferred white birds to brown birds. Des eventually settled on a mix of Hendrix and Lohmann layers. On his 40,000-bird site half of the layers are Lohmann LSL Classic and the others are Hendrix Dekalb White. The 24,000 birds on his other site are all LSL Classic.
When he was poring over production manuals, Des found that white birds ate between five and 10 per cent less feed for the same amount of output. “That’s the attraction in terms of processing, because you have got a more efficient system. Another advantage for processing is that the egg laid by the white bird has a slightly higher dry matter content. It gives them a better output at the processing plant,” said Des.
The composition of the white egg is particularly welcome for another Noble producer. Simon Dann, who farms near Dereham in Norfolk, has a 16,000-bird flock of whites producing eggs for processing, but Simon is also allowed to use some of the eggs for his on-farm ice cream business. He uses milk from his dairy herd to produce the ice cream, which has established a growing reputation locally – and the white eggs seem ideally suited to ice cream making. “I use half a dozen eggs in every litre of ice cream. The results have been very good.”
Like Des, Simon has been very happy with the birds, themselves. “They are very strong, healthy, low mortality and more disease resistant,” he said. “I am very impressed. I’ve just ordered two more flocks.” He says his current birds are coming up to 50 weeks old and will probably continue to 85 weeks – significantly longer than the conventional brown birds. “That saves me £30,000 on pullets,” said Simon.
Des said that the longer duration of lay was the result of both the increased resilience of the bird, itself, and the fact that the eggs were going for processing. “That effectively makes the pullet cheaper because you have a longer period between pullets,” he said. Des said that the white pullets cost a few pence more to buy because there were no breeding flocks in this country, but that was more than offset by the longer period of lay.
He said the price he received for his eggs was lower, but he could afford to accept the lower price because the costs of production were so much lower. Des said that Noble had offered him the option of a contract in which the price for his eggs was linked to the price of feed, but he had opted to stick with a contract which followed the egg market. The price he received from Noble was per kilogramme of egg, he said.
Des said that the improvement over his previous birds was beyond all his expectations. “We were getting down to 260 eggs per birds, which is loss making, and projecting forward we will be more like 330 eggs per bird,” said Des, who said that in addition to that he did not have to pick out seconds because all the eggs were going for processing. Feed consumption was lower because an adult white bird was between 150 and 200 and grammes lighter than his previous birds, he said veterinary bills had been much lower than before and the birds had been much easier to manage. In terms of ranging, more birds seemed to leave the sheds than before, although the birds did not range as far. Egg collections were the same as before – three times a week – but the eggs went directly to the processing plant at Bilsthorpe in Nottinghamshire.
Des is clearly a happy producer at the moment – “everything has been going perfectly,” he said – in fact he has been so impressed with the performance of the white bird that he believes it could have a bigger role to play in the UK egg market. He thinks it may be worthwhile trying to re-introduce white eggs to the shell egg market and taking advantage of the benefits he believes the white bird offers for both productivity and flock management.
