Which comes first, the chicken, the egg or the egg-production facility?

BY STEVEN MAYER 

Feb 20, 2017

It will be the largest egg-production facility Kern County has ever seen, housing more than 3 million chickens and at its peak, producing more than 36 million eggs per month.

And all done 100 percent cage-free.

Already under construction on Gun Club Road, northwest of Wasco, the facility developed by Central Valley Eggs LLC will be massive, totaling more than 700,000 square feet.

"This is a really excellent project," said Lorelei Oviatt, director of the Kern County Planning and Natural Resources Department.

The development is a natural fit for the location, which has long been zoned for agriculture, Oviatt said. The zoning allowed the development to be fast-tracked, thereby avoiding expensive and time-consuming environmental impact reporting.

However, the facility was required to get the green light from the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District.

According to Oviatt, the operation is expected to include three 77,686-square-foot mechanically ventilated pullet houses, seven 61,515-square-foot ventilated layer houses, manure handling systems, 13 backup generators, a water treatment system, water storage, wastewater handling, storm drainage storage, and associated structures.

It will initially support 53 jobs, although that number is expected to grow.

The cage-free operation comes eight years after the passage in California of Proposition 2, a voter initiative that, beginning in 2015, prohibited the confinement of certain farm animals, including chickens, in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs.

Jeff Peterson, the facility's general manager, said Central Valley Eggs is going beyond the requirements of the initiative by developing a cage-free environment for the millions of birds that will be housed there.

The trend is unmistakable. Consumers in Southern California, the company's target market, are clamoring for cage-free eggs, Peterson said, and several major U.S. companies are transitioning to eggs produced in what is viewed as a more humane environment.

The old battery-cage method afforded laying hens, on average, less space than a single sheet of letter-sized paper on which to live their entire life, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

"Battery cages present inherent animal welfare problems, most notably by their small size and barren conditions," poultry welfare expert Michael Appleby is quoted as saying on the Humane Society's website.

"Cage-free egg production, while not perfect, does not entail such inherent animal welfare disadvantages and is a very good step in the right direction for the egg industry."

U.S. consumers appear to be following trends begun in Europe, and other states have begun to follow California's lead.

"There is strong consumer interest," Peterson said, in eggs produced in cage-free environments.

But what about all that waste produced by millions of chickens?

It turns out chicken manure, known as litter, is highly prized by organic farmers, and Oviatt and Peterson said the chicken litter from the new facility is expected to be used to its best advantage.

The new company expects egg production to really get crackin' by the first quarter of 2018.