The egg business is changing.  Legislation and the economy are driving  forces behind the movement away from caging hens.  Dave Radlo wants to be ahead of the curve.

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Factory-like efficiency key to egg plant

Healthy hens, fewer eggs at cage-free plant

WINTHROP – Dave Radlo was surrounded by chickens.

The hens were shy when Radlo began the small tour of the joint Radlo Foods-Dorothy Eggs cage-free egg facility Thursday morning, leaving a wide circle around Radlo, Production Vice President Tom Shea and Bill Bell of the New England Brown Egg Council.

But the birds wandered closer the longer the men were there. Finally, one brave hen wandered up to Radlo, like she had something to say. He scooped her up like a cat and petted her while he continued talking.

She didn’t struggle, didn’t complain. And the tour continued.

“This is what I had in mind when we converted this barn,” Radlo said. “This used to be full of cages.”

Now it’s full of Rhode Island Reds, 20,000 stretching off to the horizon like russet-colored shag carpeting. The floor boils and stretches, coos and clucks. It’s alive.

“They’re singing,” Shea said. “That’s what we call it.”

The conversion had its cost. The 400-foot-long barn once held four times as many birds and produced four times as many eggs, when the birds were caged.

“But when you come in here, you’re going to see a lot of healthy, happy hens,” Radlo said.

The barn is divided into quarters, 5,000 birds per section. Each section contains three A-frame structures for roosting and three sawdust-filled boxes set on the floor for the birds to roll around in. Augurs push feed grain along a trough in the middle of the section and a water pipe provides water. Electrified barriers surround the corners of the feed trough, in an effort to keep the chickens from getting caught in the trough’s augers.

Nesting boxes, with conveyor belts underneath them, are on each side. The chickens are trained to go into the nesting boxes when it’s time to lay their eggs.

“It’s like kids on a playground,” Shea said. “They have their different places they want to be. The roughest, toughest birds go to the top of the roosts. Some like to play in the sawdust. They’re busy.”

But there’s not much movement within the 5,000 bird section. The birds recognize flocks of about 250 and stay within that flock.

“It’s what they understand,” Shea said. “This one bird may be the queen, the alpha bird out of 250 right here, but down there she’s just number 251. So she’s not going to wander too far.”

The floors are slotted, letting the chicken manure fall through and collect on the floor below.

But a cage-free operation is much more labor intensive than a caged one. One employee must be working in the barns, walking the floors, shoveling manure that doesn’t make it through the slots in the floor and collecting eggs that don’t make it to the nesting boxes.

And there always has to be at least one person monitoring each barn, every day. That means up to three people working each barn per day.

“When this was a cage barn, we were able to have a (half-time) person working each day, for four times as many birds,” Shea said. Labor alone is part of the reason cage-free eggs are more expensive.

“But what we understand is that happy, healthy hens lay healthier eggs,” Radlo said. “In other words, what’s good for the hen is good for the consumer.”