Go to Work on an Egg

I was showing a new member of the team around the district today and it included a couple of visits to businesses suffering with outbreaks of Covid-19 affecting their workforce.  It did make me smile that I was chosen to give the tour, having been working there for less than 3 months.  Still, after 28 years working there before my first retirement I suppose it was thought I would know the area reasonably well.

The first visit was to an egg laying plant and this is the underside of the conveyor belts that carry the eggs from the barns to the packing plant.  The numbers are a bit mind-boggling.  

700,000 hens on site lay about 500,000 eggs per day.  No free range here, the hens are housed in two double decker barns, 175,000 hens in each section.  The scale of the place is huge.  The UK egg industry estimate that 36 million eggs are eaten in the UK every day!  It still meant that this one site was producing more than 1 % of the total.  It was rather poignant to see the free range houses around the site rotting through lack of use.  When I started work for the Council in the late 1980s I remember investigating the noise from the fans that used to ventilate these older houses. It reminded me that despite the birds have free access to the farmland all but a few stayed on their perches within the barns.

The hens are kept for 80 weeks before being cleared out (no I didn't ask!) and then a deep clean and a new batch of hens is introduced.  The bio security is very tight with no one allowed into the barns without appropriate protective clothing (for the hens!). The waste from the barns is transferred into a bio mass plant that produces heat and electricity for the site and for feeding into the national grid.

It was also explained about the different sizes of eggs, not so much because of the individual differences between hens but that the younger birds lay the smaller eggs.