What we really need is modern inefficiencies built into organic methods. that needs to mean one hundred bird flocks along with a mobile coop egg laying house along with a portible fence system able to contain the flock inside an appropriate section of sod. My guess is that a thousand birds can with ten coops process twenty acres in ten weeks.
The purpose of all that is that the birds will dig up all that dirt and strip it of all plant material and all insects to depth. Significant fertilization takes place as well. In short the field is effectively sterilized in preparation for a new crop.
This integrates the hen operation into the organic soil preparation and captures most of the costs associated with soil preparation. That may well be enough to offset the increased costs of having free range birds.
Better yet, since feed stops been a significant external cost it becomes possible to breed far superior bird to produce both eggs and meat.
Thus a 640 acre farm can plausibly handle ten to even twenty thousand birds as well as ample plantings as well.
The Insanely Complicated Logistics of Cage-Free Eggs for All
You may not have noticed
while you were scarfing your avocado toast, but 2015 was the year of the
egg, at least as far as the food industry was concerned. An Avian flu
outbreak briefly sent egg prices soaring. Meanwhile, McDonald’s, the
world’s largest fast food chain and one of the biggest egg buyers
anywhere, announced it would ditch its conventionally farmed eggs and
sell nothing but cage-free eggs in all of its US and Canadian
restaurants. By the end of the year, just about every major fast food
chain and a handful of multinational food companies had followed suit,
including Subway, Starbucks, Nestle and most recently Wendy’s, which
joined in just this month. But these announcements had a catch. The companies said the switch to
cage-free would take anywhere from five years to a decade to complete.
How could it possibly take ten years to let a bunch of chickens out of
their cages?
As it turns out, going cage-free requires much more planning, money,
and logistical engineering than the seemingly simple notion of setting
some hens free would suggest. Ironically, this massive supply chain
overhaul stems from consumer demand to return to the egg-producing
practices of our pre-industrial past, but without undoing all the
positive benefits of scale, affordability, and safety that were achieved
through industrialization. It actually took farmers a really long time
to figure out how to put the bird in the cage—and it’s going to take a
while to figure out how to get it back out.
Think of it less like a romp through green fields surrounded by happy,
clucking hens and more like a decade-long design challenge with no
single rulebook and a lot of breakfast plates at stake.
To understand how we got here, let’s do some time traveling. Back in
the 1920s, chicken egg farmers were pretty small-scale operations. Even
the big guys only had about 400, maybe 500, hens, and these birds all
just waddled around in the dirt, coo-cooing and laying eggs everywhere.
People then had to collect those eggs by hand and clean them manually.
Sometimes animals would attack the chickens in the night. Sometimes they
attacked each other. Sometimes they stepped in their own waste and got
sick, or they hung around with other animals or birds and got sick.
Quite a few of them died. Life as a chicken has its risks.
So farmers learned how to mitigate those risks. They perfected hen
nutrition. They built enclosures, and they invented all kinds of chicken
meds. They even came up with standards for how bright the lighting in a
hen house should be, which industry experts still hilariously describe
as being just bright enough for a farmer to squat down and read a
newspaper at bird height (to think of all those squatting farmers,
reading newspapers!). Most importantly, in the 1950s, they started
housing hens in little cubbies made of chicken wire – a practice that
took off in California because it was an insta-fix for various
inefficiencies. With hens now in cages, farmers could house about
one-third to two-thirds as many birds in a single hen house. Hens walked
on raised floors so they weren’t stepping in their own waste. They
couldn’t peck each other as much and they were protected from other
animals. Mortality went down.
Over the years, cage systems have evolved in various ways. But they
remain the single most important innovation in egg production because
they’ve turned what was once a cottage industry into a global commodity.
Without caged birds, it’s entirely possible that the Egg McMuffin
itself may never have existed and would certainly not be as globally
accessible—and affordable—as it is today.
The Outcry Against Cages
Rose Acre Farms, one of the biggest egg producers in the US, has
about 25 million laying hens. In 2014, the US as a whole produced nearly
100 billion eggs, totaling $10.2 billion in revenue. This kind of mass
production depends on cages. With those tiny wire boxes, farmers can
micromanage everything about a bird’s life. They can even help automate
egg collection by forcing the bird to lay its eggs directly into a
funnel that drops down into a collection area.
Today, eggs are widely available and cheap mostly because of caging systems.
But keeping a living thing in a metal cage so small that it can’t
move its wings or stand up for the duration of its short life has raised
inevitable questions about animal suffering and welfare. It’s no longer
enough to churn out cheap eggs. Especially in recent years, consumers
have increasingly demanded to know more about their food’s origins—where
it’s from, how it was raised, and under what conditions.
Cage-free systems require more labor and less control, which together can cost a farmer a lot of extra money.
And many are finding the lives of caged chickens too rough to
stomach. Pictures of molting, sickly birds flooded the Internet. The
egg, once the epitome of the wholesome American breakfast and the key
ingredient of delicate French pastries, became a flashpoint of criticism
for industries that rely on living animals in order to produce a
commodity.
That distaste has spurred increased demand for what’s still known in
the industry as specialty eggs – most of all “cage-free,” which first
started popping up at places like Whole Foods, and have since made their
steady way into the mainstream. Yet even as the pressure for farmers to
convert to cage-free began building, few wanted to give up the caged
system.
Cage-free systems require more labor and less control, which together
can cost a farmer a lot of extra money. But the biggest hindrance to
going cage-free is the imperative of efficiency—meeting today’s huge
demand for eggs with yesterday’s techniques. Back when birds weren’t in
cages, farmers produced a fraction as many eggs. And the cage-free
systems of today only house about a third to two-thirds as many birds as
a conventional caging system. Cage-free is, by design, less efficient
than the conventional cage. And since most agricultural innovation has
been focused on improving the efficiency of the cage, large scale
farmers today don’t feel like they have access to a system they trust
that will allow chickens more living space while still keeping
production up and mortality down on the scale of traditional caged
systems. In order to do cage-free properly, farmers have to reduce their
flock numbers, which means a decrease in production and an increase in
price.
“In the industry as a whole, people felt like they were doing the
right thing (with conventional cages),” says Rick Brown, a market
analyst who’s been following the egg industry for 30 years. “We got away
from cage-free in the 50’s for a whole host of reasons. People felt
that the cages were better for the birds.”
But in 2015, egg suppliers were left with little choice. Big Food
companies, in all their pre-cooked, kids’ meal, drive-thru glory, began
announcing one after the other that they would stop using eggs from
chickens kept in conventional cages and only buy from farmers who raise
cage-free hens. The surge in demand seems likely to force fundamental
changes in how the egg industry operates. McDonald’s alone buys up two
billion eggs a year for its US restaurants alone. “You’re talking about a
scale that is completely unprecedented,” says Sam Oches, who edits QSR,
a trade publication covering the fast food industry. “At the end of the
day, these decisions are built around consumer demand.”
Pressure to Convert
Now, egg suppliers are left with an obvious choice: meet the growing
demand for cage-free eggs or lose your biggest customers. So, suppliers
are caving. They didn’t like it, but if it’s what their customers
wanted, they’d do it. “Now Rose Acre Farms is converting its operations
to cage-free, a switch that all the major suppliers are likely to make,
if they’re not in the process of doing so already.
This means that in the future, the pasteurized liquid egg product
fast food restaurants serve up at drive-thru’s across the US will come
from the same chickens that pop out those fancy $6 egg cartons sitting
in your Instacart. McDonald’s and a handful of its fast food peers have
given their vendors until 2025, which seems like a luxurious amount of
time to make the change. That’s until you consider the daunting design
and tech challenges that lay ahead for the industry.
For starters, birds that live in cages can’t be transferred to a
cage-free environment halfway through their lives. Farmers have to start
with a new generation of chickens. “The chicken itself has to learn how
to be in the environment and deal with things that they may not be used
to in a caged environment,” says Jonathan Spurway of Rembrandt Foods,
the third-largest egg supplier in the US.
Cages remain the single most important innovation in egg production
because they’ve turned what was once a cottage industry into a global
commodity.
When a hen is born and raised in a cage, her immune system depends on
limited direct contact with other birds, and she falls into a pecking
order that is determined in part by the cages. If you placed that hen in
a cage-free house, she might get attacked by other hens above her in
the pecking order, or her body might not be able to fend off a host of
new vectors from other birds. So even as Rembrandt is in the process of
switching over its facilities, it’s looking at breeding a massive new
generation of chickens. For the entire industry, that’s a huge number of
birds. Right now, the US market has about 300 million laying hens, and
only about eight percent of them are cage-free.
Meanwhile, what a large-scale commercial cage-free hen house even
looks like is still very much up for grabs—no consensus has emerged yet
on what “cage-free” even means. Unlike the “organic” label, which is
only bestowed based on specific federal requirements, eggs don’t go
through a standardized certification process in order to be called
cage-free. Instead, farmers follow one of multiple standards created by
third parties. Different states and different fast food companies all
have their own criteria for what they consider “cage-free.” In
California, for example, all shelled eggs (many fast food joints cook
with pasteurized pre-cracked egg liquid, not fresh shelled eggs) are
required to be cage-free. By California’s definition, that means a bird
should be able to stand up, turn around, and spread its wings—but it can
still be housed in a cage and isn’t required to have access to the
outdoors. McDonald’s’ cage-free standards, meanwhile, involve what’s
called an aviary system, which allows birds to travel vertically
throughout a hen house on a series of platforms and ramps.
The Logistics of Egg-Laying
Still, even the ability to move around just a little bit more will
increase a supplier’s feed costs as birds burn through more calories. So
farmers try to find efficiencies in other ways, like building vertical
cage-free systems that maximize the use of floor space in a barn. But
switching over to these new systems won’t be easy and it won’t be quick.
While there are different ways that a farmer can design a barn to make
sure every square inch is used up efficiently, “those differences create
cost,” Spurway says. Exactly what that cost is depends on a multitude
of factors, like if a farmer is retrofitting an existing barn or
building a new barn and what state the barn is in, but Ken Anderson, who
helps run a research egg farm at North Carolina State University, says a
brand new barn complete with an aviary system can set a farmer back
about $4 million.
But before you can even start thinking about how to redesign a barn,
there’s the issue of all those old cages and the equipment that goes
with them. For a single barn that houses around 100,000 hens, a farmer
can easily spend half-a-million dollars or more on a conventional caged
system expected to last 15 to 20 years.
“You don’t take a five-year-old cage system and rip it out,” says Anderson. “The economics of that will put people out of business.” Instead, farmers must find ways to spread out the cost of those cages over time until they’ve gotten their money’s worth.
That process could take anywhere from, you guessed it, 15 to 20 years
plus the amount of time it takes to build the new system (for that, add
on another year or so, plus a few million dollars).
As far as that new system goes, by definition you can’t fit as many
chickens in a cage-free house as you can in a caged house. So if you fit
100,000 chickens in your conventional barn before, you’re looking at
housing roughly a third of those birds in your new cage-free barn. The
rest of them need a new house, so you’re back to square one with getting
a building permit and building a new barn.
While you’re at it, take into consideration all of those risks that
chicken egg farmers dealt with back in the day – the disease, the
attacks, the efficiency issues – and reintroduce them back into your
life. One of the hardest risks to mitigate is chicken behavior. In large
groups, hens are surprisingly violent creatures toward one another and
can partake in some pretty cutthroat pecking order hazing rituals. The
cage was a partial solution to that problem because chickens didn’t have
a lot of room to interact, and a better solution doesn’t really exist
in mainstream large-scale egg production culture yet. In large-scale
“enriched colony systems,” which are “cage-free” houses that are
actually like caged houses but with bigger cages and a few added
amenities, birds tend to be more violent.
“Chickens aren’t really trainable,” adds Anderson. “There is no
technology that exists to mitigate the social interaction of the birds.”
In order to address issues like aggression, Anderson says
agricultural research will have to work double-time to find and create
better technologies and design layouts for cage-free barns in order to
meet Big Food’s ambitious ten-year deadline while keeping prices in
check. Think of it less like a romp through green fields surrounded by
happy, clucking hens and more like a decade-long design challenge with
no single rulebook and a lot of breakfast plates at stake.
The Cost of Cage-Free
If you’re wondering who will pay for all of this, join the club.
Market analysts, industry reps, and fast food CEOs are all concerned
about a myriad of potential fiscal consequences, but no one is sure who
will bear the brunt. Ideas vary on how much a surge in prices could
impact the market for eggs. But while vendors are reluctant to say so,
it seems inevitable that consumers will be the ones to ultimately
shoulder the added cost. The question is whether egg-eaters will be
willing to take on that burden. Farmers will initially front the bulk of
the expense of going cage-free, but there are any number of guesses how
that money will be transferred along the supply chain. And it’s that
uncertainty that makes the egg industry nervous.
“What people say they want and what they’ll pay for are different
things in many instances,” says Brown. “But somebody will have to pay
for it eventually.”
Eggs are among the many goods known as “inelastic commodities,”
which, like gasoline and milk, people still buy even when they’re more
expensive. For a place like McDonald’s, a small increase in price per
egg becomes a massive cost overall. To pay for it, the company may have
to charge more for its iconic McMuffin, trim back the number of menu
items that contain eggs, or both. It’s really anyone’s guess, because
McDonald’s itself doesn’t know for sure what the cost implications will
be, which is why the company gave itself ten years to figure it out.
Within that chunk of time, it’s probable that cage-free eggs will be
cheaper than they are today because suppliers will be producing more of
them, explains Lisa McComb, a representative for McDonald’s.
“It’s like a weird call-back to Office Space,” says Andrew Alvarez, a
food industry analyst for IBISWorld. In Mike Judge’s movie, workers
thought they were taking advantage of a computer bug to steal pennies
from the company. They didn’t realize those pennies would add up, and
they woke up the next morning to find that they’d siphoned off hundreds
of thousands of dollars from their company. That’s what a small increase
in price does when you’re buying enormous amounts of a commodity every
year. “It has a massive impact.”
Still, when California’s egg prices shot up after it implemented its
new cage-free requirements, people still bought eggs. Also, the price
hike wasn’t just because the state had switched to cage-free – there was
also a massive avian flu outbreak that dwindled supply. Now that the
outbreak has passed, farmers can start to rebuild their hen populations,
which should help slow the surge just as the higher costs associated
with cage-free should begin to self correct thanks to economies of
scale, says Alvarez. As more big egg buyers demand cage-free, farmers
will really have no choice but to innovate—an irresistible incentive
that could lead to a better understanding of how to achieve both
commodity-level production and better conditions for animals.
“Ten years ago this was really something you were paying a premium
for because nobody was doing it,” Oches says. “Now that there are more
farmers scaling up, all of these dominoes will start falling and the egg
industry will be able to provide the supply at the cost they’re looking
for.”
Still, to get there, farmers will have to essentially go back in time
and recreate the past fifty-some years of egg production innovation,
sans cage. The challenge reflects a strange mix of consumer nostalgia
and entitlement: we want it all—eggs raised humanely at scale—and at a
price we can still afford. In one respect, it’s the crux of most
‘disruptive’ tech companies’ strategies. They promise to do it all, but
only a few can truly make it work—with cost being the compromise that
typically undermines the process. But the call for cage-free isn’t just
about ‘disrupting’ technology. It’s about fundamentally altering the way
the egg industry relies on living, breathing animals with their own
unpredictable natures and vulnerabilities to both make a profit and feed
the masses.
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