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Egg farmers: Good managing can help control salmonella

Egg farmers: Good managing can help control salmonella

There is nothing small scale about Pearl Valley Eggs, deep in the heart of Illinois farm country. The egg farm itself, two miles south of the nearest town, is a neat collection of 350-foot- and 450-foot henhouses covered in white steel siding. They're linked by overhead pipes that bring in ground corn and soybeans from the farm's own feed mill.

The farm employs 100 people and produces 800,000 to 850,000 eggs a day, seven days a week. "The chickens don't stop laying eggs just because it's the weekend," says Ben Thompson, 30, who runs the farm with his father, Dave.

The chickens live in 27.7-inch-by-22.6-inch cages, eight to a cage. The cages are 19 inches tall, says Dave Thompson, 61, the farm's founder. "I made them extra tall because I wanted them to have more room." The six rows of cages are stacked on top of each other, in lines 277 cages long.

Yet, in the face of the nation's largest recorded egg recall, a total of 550 million eggs potentially infected with salmonella enteritidis, and revelations of filthy conditions at the two Iowa egg farms involved, many animal rights groups and organic supporters have pointed a finger of blame at industrial animal agriculture.

Only by returning to small-scale, local farms (according to the organic and local supporters) or by ending or drastically limiting the use of animals as a food source (several animal rights groups), or both, can Americans protect themselves against such large, food-borne outbreaks.

"There's significantly lower risk for cage-free and free range" than eggs from caged hens, says Michael Greger, director of public health and animal agriculture for the Humane Society of the United States, which opposes industrial animal agriculture and encourages Americans to move toward a more vegetarian diet.

Ben Thompson of Pearl Valley Eggs begs to differ. The farm his father founded in 1987 about two and a half hours west of Chicago now houses a whopping 1.1 million Shaver chickens in seven henhouses. But since the Thompsons began testing a decade ago, the farm has never once had a positive test for salmonella enteritidis.

Conveyer belts below each row whisk away the chicken manure. Another conveyer system in front of the cages brings clean, new food.

A wall of four-foot fans at the end of the building, looking something like the bottom of a rocket ship, keeps the air quality inside almost as clean as the outdoors, as well as keeping temperatures down, despite up to 167,000 chickens to a house. On average only 1% of their hens die a year, a remarkably low number compared with the average of 3% to 4% in caged birds and 6% to 8% a year in cage-free birds, says Jeffrey Armstrong, dean of the School of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Each hen lays an egg about five days out of seven, Thompson says. The eggs roll down a gentle incline from each cage to a conveyer, which slowly moves them along to a second set of conveyers that leads directly to the packing house. There, the eggs are washed in 115-degree ?water with soap and detergent, then dried, checked for cracks, graded by weight and packed in cartons before going into a 48-degree warehouse. They're shipped to supermarkets with 24 hours of being laid, Thompson says.

"Our opinion and belief is that this is the best way to raise a bird," the 30-year-old farmer says.

The truth of exactly what's needed to keep salmonella enteritidis in check is scrambled up in a complex omelet of issues.

The first question is whether caged or cage-free flocks are more at risk for salmonella. It depends on whom you ask.

Caroline Smith  DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest,  thinks the answer is that they're pretty much the same. "Studies from Europe have shown that risk of salmonella enteritidis infection is lower in cage-free birds, while studies from the U.S. have shown higher rates of infection from cage-free birds. Differences in other production methods besides caged vs. cage-free may account for these discrepancies," she says.

Those include size of flock, age of infrastructure (older buildings are harder to clean), cleaning method between flocks, egg collection method and vaccination rates of chickens. But this is where size starts to matter. Overall, big flocks have more salmonella than small flocks, and caged flocks are bigger than cage-free small flocks.

U.S. conventional caged flocks tend to be much bigger than European flocks. On average, the typical caged flock, hens all in one building, tends to be about 100,000 in the United States. Cage-free flocks average about 25,000 birds, according to estimates from the United Egg Producers, an industry group that includes both types of growers.

"They just have huge flock sizes," the Humane Society's Greger says of caged operations.

There is a definite link between large flock size and salmonella. On average, large-scale U.S. layer operations with more than 100,000 hens per house are four times more likely to test positive for salmonella enteritidis than smaller houses with fewer than 100,000 hens, according to a paper set for publication in January in the journal Poultry Science. The report suggests that one reason might be that salmonella is transmitted in contaminated feces and dust, and higher densities of birds mean more of both.

At the same time, scientists caution that there haven't been good studies to show the rate of salmonella infection in equally large flocks that are cage free.

Big doesn't have to mean salmonella-ridden, Thompson says. His father designed the farm to keep the hens healthy and disease free. Unlike at Wright County Egg, the Galt, Iowa, farm where eight-foot piles of manure built up in manure pits under the houses — alive with rodents, flies and maggots and growing so large that doors couldn't be opened or shut — Pearl Valley has no manure pit and precious little manure in its laying houses.

By the time the manure reaches the end of the conveyer belts it's also dry when it's scraped off the belt and taken to the farm's composting shed, where the 10-foot pile of crumbly-dry manure that smells only faintly of chickens waits to be turned into rich compost the farm sells to golf courses and garden stores.

About 30% of current U.S. henhouses have such systems, says Hongwei Xin, director of the Egg Industry Center at Iowa State University. They also cost about 50% more to build than older systems where manure builds up in the bottom of the house. Those make up about 70% of today's henhouses and are cleaned out once a month to once a year depending on where the house is and how it's managed. Today, 85% to 90% of new henhouses are built with conveyer belts to deal with manure, he says.

The Thompsons also have very strict biocontrol standards. To get into any henhouse you have to step around in a rectangular pan with a squishy pad soaked with disinfectant to kill anything on your shoes that might carry disease. Employees can't go from one house to another without disinfecting their shoes first. Even farm machinery is disinfected to ensure that there's no cross-contamination. At Wright County, Food and Drug Administration investigators reported employees going in and out of henhouses with no cleanup at all between.

"This is what my dad built his business on, making the hens comfortable so they produce well. He was able to do things economically without cutting corners," Ben says proudly of his father, Dave, who is still actively managing the farm with Ben. He started out as a first-grade teacher who bought some eggs for a class project, so the kids could see them hatch. Those eggs grew to hens and he began selling their eggs to other teachers. Eventually he ended up managing a laying operation, and in 1987 struck out on his own, founding the farm that he and his son now run.

It's not that the older, high-rise systems can't have excellent air quality and cleanliness, Xin says. "It can be done," he says. "It all depends on how you manage it."

That's a common theme. "It is about management — each type (of production method) has its advantages and disadvantages," Michigan State's Armstrong says.

But in the egg business, there's not a lot of money to put toward good management. Over the past 30 years, egg farmers have on average made 6.7 cents profit on each dozen eggs they sold, Xin says. "That's pretty thin," he says.

At Pearl Valley, Dave Thompson says happy hens, safe eggs and making a profit are possible, but it takes a lot of attention to detail and spending 12 hours a day, seven days a week in the barns. "I take good care of my birds and my wife, and I put every penny back into the farm."

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Where can I find empty egg cartons?

I am doing an activity for my students on Thursday and am in need of 8 empty egg cartons. I don't feel like buying that many eggs, does any place sell the empty egg cartons?

Try contacting your local coffee shop (Denny's, IHOP, Coco's) and ask if they have any to give you.

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