Eggs come first at Green Valley

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff

This is a story about the egg and its trip from the largest egg producer in the state, here on Wyndale Road in Washington County, to the distribution center in Abingdon and to the store and consumer. This week, in part 1 of 3, we’ll start with the hen houses and processing plant.

An egg slips though a chicken’s legs, past the wires of the cage and onto a slow-moving conveyor belt. Nearly 200,000 chickens live in house No. 9 at Green Valley Poultry Farm on Wyndale Road. There are rows and rows, layers and layers of regulation 24-by-25-inch cages. The whir of the conveyor belt and cluck of the hens mix with the smells of dust and chicken feed.
Ronnie Owens of Laurel Bloomery works two houses at the farm. He walks 4,088 feet of catwalk in each house each round. He sweeps his head back and forth scanning the six rows of chicken cages stacked eight feet high. Back and forth, back and forth, looking for jammed up eggs, water leaks and dead chickens.
Owens said he really likes his job.
“You do a lot of walking and looking and paying attention,” he said. “My houses run smooth.”

Life and death
Green Valley Poultry Farm is sister company to Dutt & Wagner and has 760,000 hens on the farm.
The hens, which get more than the required 67 square inches of space, lay one egg every 25 hours. The nine houses on the farm are environmentally controlled with a constant temperature of 72 degrees inside. The lights burn 17 hours a day.
The hens reach their peak production at 30 weeks post-shell. At around 65 to 80 weeks they molt, shedding and renewing their feathers. The lights are reduced to eight to 12 hours a day. They get a less dense feed, something like cracked corn, and they quit laying eggs. The hens’ weight drops 20 percent to 2.85 pounds, where they have to stay for 21 days.
“It gives their reproductive track a rest and it shrinks,” Green Valley Poultry Farm Vice President Rodney Wagner said. “It’s a seasonal thing. In the world it would happen the same, but we have to induce it here. They don’t go without feed, we don’t take water away and they’re not in the dark except to sleep.”
Eight weeks later, the lights come on, the feed goes up and the hens start laying again. Until …
At 115 weeks, the hens are rendered which means they’re euthanized with CO2 and hauled off to a processing plant in Georgia where they’re made into meal. One year ago Green Valley Poultry Farm began euthanizing all of the birds, a process that costs six and a half cents per bird, cheaper than it costs to slaughter them.
“Live haul is still an option but right now the market dictates that they be euthanized and rendered into meal,” Wagner said.

Production line
When the eggs leave the houses they scoot along a quarter mile conveyor belt before tumbling softly into the processing plant.
There they’re washed twice and sorted.
A light box shines beneath the eggs, allowing Virginia Compton to cull the bad ones. She can tell which ones have blood in them, which ones are cracked.
She picks those out. In another area, a sound wave scanner separates the cracked ones Compton might have missed.
Compton started at the first Dutt & Wagner farm in Rhea Valley 25 years ago. She said she’d walk the hen houses then, sort of like what Ronnie Owens does now. In 1995, she came to the processing plant on Wyndale Road and decided to stay.
“I like the grading and picking,” Compton said. “You can rest up there; gives me time to think. Sometimes you get sleepy especially in the summer when it gets hot. I like to work hard.”
The eggs are blow dried and file into the packaging area. The plant packages 1,759 cases a day – more than a half million eggs. The hens at Green Valley Poultry Farm lay eggs destined for the local grocery store shelves, as well as outlets in the Middle East, India and China.

How it began
This chicken egg operation looked a lot different 45 years ago when Rodney Wagner’s father first started producing eggs for Dutt & Wagner. The first company hen houses were on the farm in Rhea Valley. In 1963 the farm had 29,000 cages with two birds to a cage laying 22,000 eggs a day.
At 11, Rodney Wagner was digging thistles in the fields, collecting eggs by hand and building cages on the farm. That started the production, which grew, and pretty soon they were harvesting and packaging enough eggs to send to surrounding states. Wagner’s grandfather started Dutt & Wagner, a distribution business in Pennsylvania. He would buy eggs and poultry in the countryside and sell them in the city.
“My grandfather told my dad never to produce your own eggs; he said you’ll go broke,” Wagner said.
But when his dad decided to do it anyway the business grew. He didn’t go broke. He ended up owning 1,200 acres throughout Washington County. He wound up with 12 hen houses all over the area and a plant in Abingdon where the eggs were washed, packaged and sent out.
“That’s Jesse Clark,” Wagner said pointing to a black and white photo on the wall of his office. Its of a man standing by a truck stacked high with caged broiler chickens. “He was a driver and lived on Whites Mill Road. He taught me how to cuss and fish.”
Wagner took classes at the community college and wanted to move on to Virginia Tech but was always needed on the farm.
So he slowly got sucked in.
There was one manager who had taught him a lot about how to run a farm, including how other companies did it. When that man quit, Wagner, then 24, took over.
“They’re not a machine,” he said of his hens. “It takes love and care or they won’t do their part.”

Consolidating operations
As times changed, so did the industry. Wagner discovered that to make it as an egg producer, he would have to consolidate production. So the company began to shut down hen houses in the 1990s. The goal was to put all their eggs in one basket, one central location.
In other cost saving measures, the company also decided to quit buying feed. Instead, it would make its own. It also decided to raise its own pullets from its own hatchlings.
“We just had to do these things to stay in the business, we’ve had to be integrated,” Wagner said. “A lot of the same people that worked in the hen houses out in the county followed us here.”
Green Valley Poultry Farm now makes 640 tons of meal a week, mostly corn and soybean with some pork meat and bone. The corn comes from Ohio and Indiana and the bone and meat from North Carolina, Wagner said.
“At one point we could pinpoint the price of feed for the next six months, now it changes by the week,” feed meal manager Mike Abel said.
About 100 chickens die each day of natural causes. In 2002, the company had to stop burying its dead chickens. So they started the composting operation.
Now the dead birds are mixed with chicken litter that falls through the cages to the ground floor of the hen houses. Piles are later mixed with sawdust and horse manure from the Virginia Intermont College stables and sold for $50 per ton.
Though the waste has been made into a sellable product, Wagner said the composting operation is not profitable.

The egg industry
“Egg producers might only make money a year or two out of every five,” Wagner said. “There used to be 500 individual egg producers in Virginia now there are only three.”
He said they used to sell their chickens as spent foul but around the mid-1980s he started seeing a change. People weren’t buying the meat because his hens weren’t bred for meat, so they were a tougher bird. Besides, meat birds had become so cheap it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Processors found that buying broiler meat was cheaper even if Green Valley Poultry Farm gave them their spent foul, Wagner said.
“When we first started we had two or three companies bidding on spent hens and they would get 18 to 24 cents a pound,” he said. “That would go to buy replacement baby chicks. Now it costs 65 to 70 cents for a replacement chick (and the farm pays to dispose of the spent foul.)”
The way Wagner’s farm runs might not be around much longer.
He said Virginia’s bound to see more regulation. It started in 2002, when the state mandated that the birds have more room in their cages.
“I always felt the industry did crowd the birds too much,” Wagner said.
Wagner said that as a way to pre-empt animal rights objections, United Egg Producers, a national trade association, set up a panel of experts to set up guidelines, such as giving birds more space.
“A lot of people say it’s the fox guarding the hen house,” Wagner said. “But the people on the panel are not all friends of the animal agriculture industry, they’re scientists. The idea is to make decisions based on science, not on emotions.”
The panel decided 52 square inches per bird wasn’t enough and required 67 square inches per bird.
“I had 125,000 birds a house now we barely have 100,000 but we produce the same amount of eggs,” Wagner said. He said genetics and increased space helps the birds produce more. He said he thinks they’re probably at the maximum amount of space now, though. Any more and the birds would probably start producing less eggs, he said.
If Virginia passed legislation banning cages, like California did in 2008, Wagner said it would be bad for business and bad for egg prices.
“It would put us out of business as we are now,” he said. “We may be able to do something on a smaller scale but it would just take so much land.”
California’s Proposition 2 orders that egg-laying hens be able to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely by 2015. Battery cages have also been banned in Europe effective 2012.
A similar proposition was defeated in Ohio.
Wagner attributes some of his revenue this year to regulations in other states because he can now sell his eggs cheaper than his counterparts in the more regulated states.
“It will be good for a few of us until it happens to us,” he said.
Dutt & Wagner General Manager Kenny Hobbs said it would cost about $40 a bird to transition from cage to cage free.
“The uncertainty of the future is keeping prices up because they’re not producing more eggs,” Wagner said. “Right now people are afraid to invest (in egg producers) and expand. Everything we do is with borrowed money and right now people aren’t replacing old facilities (because of the uncertainty of the industry as it is now.)”
Wagner said he thinks Virginia will be one of the last states for these regulations but he does think they will come.
“I think there will be big changes in the next 10 years,” Wagner said.
To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail csullivan@wythenews.com or call (276) 628-7101.