Last year, when Bobby Bowen, a young Southside Virginia farmer, told his wife that Tyson Foods was shutting its Glen Allen chicken processing plant, she started crying.
And he figured it meant an end to his dreams of following his dad and grandfather working the family farm — a dream his dad had tried to discourage him from following.
But now that he and other chicken farmers who had supplied Tyson have banded together in the new Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative, they've found a new and very different kind of poultry market: eggs from free range hens.
Indiana-based Dutch Country Organics is looking to have co-op members tending 1 million hens in the first year of their multi-year agreement, rising to 2 million in the second year, said cooperative president John Bapties.
“We just couldn’t find anyone who wanted broilers,” he said. “That market is saturated.”
Broilers are chickens raised for meat and bred to grow fast. They’re typically delivered as chicks and shipped to the processing plant when they reach about 4 pounds, usually when they’re about 7 to 9 weeks old. They spend that time inside.
Eggs — at least the new style, cage-free eggs that Dutch Country wants — are a different business altogether.
Founded by Lamar Bontrager, Dutch Country Organics is an Amish-owned business specialty egg business based in Middleburg, Indiana. It contracts with more than 50 Indiana Amish farm families to produce fresh, cage-free other specialty table eggs. It sells its eggs through national outlets including Costco, Albertsons, Target, Aldi, Walmart and Kroger.
“The family farm is our story. It’s what we support. It’s what we encourage. The family farm, where fresh, natural eggs come from fresh, clean environments,” Bontrager said.
“We promote the family farm, where families work together to provide a place that hens can live and roam, doing what comes naturally to them,” he said. “Healthy and happy hens produce eggs that are healthier, too. And that’s good for all of us.”
For Matthew Ingram, the 5th generation Nottaway County farmer who received the first lot of laying hens this month, it’s a big commitment to switch from the broilers, for which he and other Southside growers couldn’t find buyers, to eggs.
“It’s still chickens,” he said. “But there’s a lot to learn.”
His family has been raising chickens since the 1950s; the big 18,000-bird houses he’s had to refit went up in the 1990s.
Those were meant to house chickens for no more than a month and half at a time, in large open spaces. The birds stayed inside, eating feed supplied by Tyson, which dropped off the chicks and picked up the nearly-full grown birds — still too young to lay eggs.
“We were paid managers … Tyson kept the profits,” Bapties said. “Now we’re going to keep them.”
But letting chickens range around in a chicken house that’s as long as a football field isn’t an efficient way to gather eggs — not from the 18,000 birds in a house that Ingram and Bowen are aiming for.
Since co-op members will need to have thousands of hens in their houses, they’ll also need a conveyor-belt type system for collecting the eggs.
They'll need packing machines to gently jostle breakable eggs into plastic trays for shipping and scales for weighing eggs and chickens — the co-op’s consulting nutritionists will be watching their reports to see if the mix of grains, vitamins and minerals the hens are eating and yielding eggs of the size and quality Dutch Country wants.
The growers will also need coolers to store the eggs for a few days until they can be shipped.
They had to find new feed suppliers — Tyson used to do that for its contractors.
And since Dutch Country wants hens to be able to wander and peck at the earth for seeds and worms, the way chickens used to do, they’ll need to fence it areas outside for the hens to do what chickens want to do.
It’s a big shift and means big new investment — $400,000 to more than $1 million to refit the huge, warehouse-like buildings where trh growers used to raise 18,000 or more “broiler” chickens at a time.
There will be other changes, too. Bowen, Ingram and the other co-op members will be keeping the birds for more than a year.
The pullets, not chicks, that co-op members get arrive when they’re 16 weeks old — Bapties is running houses that raise day-old chicks to the 16-week birds that Ingram and the other co-op members who run the laying-hen houses get.
The hens won’t start laying eggs for another 5 weeks after they arrive.
During that time, co-op member Roger Reynolds, who’s been farming in Southside beginning as a kid in the 1960s, says he expects to be a lot busier than when he was doing broilers.
“It’s not like broilers, where you can maybe go to church and come back later,” Reynolds said. “You need to be there, walking through — they want to get away from you, into the nest boxes; you want them a bit nervous.”
You also want them trained.
Ingram, for instance, expects to be walking through four times a day, at least at first, after an overhead chain-feeder dumps food on the slanted panels leading up to his new nest boxes. The idea is to get the birds to eat and then lay an egg.
“They’ll know when it’s time to come inside and lay,” Reynolds said.
“I think it’s most like dairy,” with that same kind of demanding daily schedule, Bowen said.
“I can tell you there’s been a lot of late night phone calls, a lot of research, to see how this is going to work,” he said. “But cage free looks like it’s the way the market’s going. If we can get in and get established, I think there’s a future."
The interior of a new cage-free chicken house is seen here under construction in Crewe. The new buildings should be able to home 18,000 "broiler" chickens at a time.