DaytonDailyNews.com

Big farms driving small independents out of business

By Ben Sutherly
Dayton Daily News

Wayne Twp., Darke County | Melvin Stucke leads me down a corridor of cages so vast I can't see the other end.

Five-watt fluorescent bulbs fastened to the sheet-metal ceiling dimly show the way, as well as the imprints left by our boots on the dusty catwalk. Placed along the catwalk's edge every few steps are pieces of black corrugated drainage tile with rat poison inside to kill rodents.

It's hard to hear each other over the house's 85,000 chickens. At times, their din seems as raucous as the incessant cawing of thousands of crows.

Yet at 444 feet long, House No. 1 is the smallest of four hen houses at Stucke Beef & Egg. The largest, No. 4, is 604 feet long — longer than two football fields — and home to about 115,000 birds.

"If you walk (all the corridors in) this house, you'll walk a mile," Stucke says of House No. 4.

We pull on leather gloves for this task, one of the few that haven't been automated in today's high-tech, high-rise hen houses. The egg industry calls it "mortality pickup." Here at Stucke Beef & Egg, they call it "dead-birding."

Disposing of the dead is part of life on this Darke County farm, just as it is on the Miami County dairy where I grew up and on any livestock or poultry farm. It was part of life in the 1940s, when Stucke's family had a 20-by-40 foot house for 300 chickens. On a megafarm, numerous chores, including dead-birding, are simply multiplied many times over.

The modern egg farm's magnitude and complexity became clear to me during a week of work in April at Stucke Beef & Egg, though the farm is small by today's standards. In April, it had 285,000 chickens and 990 beef cattle. Some commercial egg producers house millions of chickens at one location.

I was drawn in part to the Stucke farm not by its size, but because it's one of the few independent egg megafarms left in Darke and Mercer counties; most have contracts with Fort Recovery Equity or other giant egg companies. Because Stucke Beef & Egg has no contract, it has borne the full brunt of nearly four years of depressed egg prices.

Stereotypes of "family farm" and "factory farm" blur at Stucke Beef & Egg, just as they do at dozens of farms within an hour's drive of Dayton. Imposing at first, the farm retains a certain intimacy as father, mother, son and son-in-law go about their daily routines.

The Stuckes still call the 78-acre farm where they keep their chickens and cattle home. Melvin Stucke's son, Mark, and his family live in the farmhouse where he grew up. Melvin and his wife of 43 years, Mary Ann, built a new house on the farm 15 years ago.

Mary Ann and son Mark often start their morning chores together, feeding cattle in the shadow of four silos, the tallest of which towers more than 100 feet above the family's 1 1/2-acre feed lot.

Melvin Stucke sometimes spends his mornings at work in the chicken houses. With 51,552 cages to check daily, he and a handful of hired helpers can't afford to give each one more than a passing glance.

Stucke walks the corridors of cages and chickens deliberately, his pace like that of a shopper pushing a grocery cart down an aisle between stops. Only instead of a grocery cart, Stucke pushes a small red wheelbarrow as he scans the cages to our left. I scan those to our right as I bring up the rear. New to the job, my eyes move up and down the 6-foot-tall wall of cages more slowly than his. After a few minutes, I lag behind. Stucke stops the wheelbarrow and walks back to me, checking cages on my side. Then he returns to the wheelbarrow and picks up on his side where he left off.

Like eggs, dead chickens tend to be pushed out front, making them easier to spot. Sometimes it takes a good tug on the handle to open a cage's wire door. Before it opens, a skittish, squawking feathery mass barrels to the back of the cage.

Layers are light — mature birds here weigh 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 pounds. I hand the dead ones I find to Stucke, who puts them in the wheelbarrow. Occasionally, it takes an extra yank or two to free dead birds whose toes still clutch the bottoms of their wire cages.

As Stucke walks the barn, he is doing much more than looking for dead chickens. He assesses the live hens' health, scoops up the occasional bird that escaped a cage left open, and keeps an eye out for any bird that may have caught its wing or head in the space beneath the feed auger. He listens for chirping, which can indicate respiratory problems.

"Even something as simple as dead-birding has management connected to it," Stucke says. "I go through them to check them the same as the cattle."

He records in a notebook the number of dead chickens found in each row and in each house.

"You need to keep track of the mortality count so you know how many live birds you have in the house" and how much to feed them, he said.

Stucke removes birds that appear ill or near death and puts them on the catwalk. If they get up, they go back in a cage. If they don't, he picks them up, turns his back to me, gives their necks a quick yank and puts them in the wheelbarrow.

The life of a layer
Chickens arrive at Stucke Beef & Egg as day-old fluff balls, spending their first 16 to 17 weeks growing into 2 3/4-pound pullets in the pullet house. Then workers, using semis and dollies, haul them a stone's throw down Ohio 185 to the main farm.

Three weeks later, inside two-story hen houses, the hens begin a life of laying eggs.

On days when they're in full production, the farm's 285,000 birds eat about 30 tons of ground corn, soybean meal and a poultry supplement. They drink about 14,250 gallons of water daily from red cone-shaped waterers, though consumption varies with egg production and temperature.

Ground-level exhaust fans four feet across pull air down from the cage area above, over the manure piles below and out of the barns. Fresh air enters the buildings near the eaves, cooling the birds and flushing ammonia and other potentially toxic manure byproducts from the building.

Negative air pressure can vary slightly from barn to barn, creating air movement in the walkways. During my week at the farm, I gradually became indifferent to doors slamming behind me as I passed between hen houses via walkways connecting their upper floors.

Chickens lay eggs in decks of wire cages stacked four-high; their manure piles up below. Each cage houses five to six chickens and measures 16 inches by 20 inches, or 320 square inches — an area equal to seven columns in this newspaper.

A curtain covers the back of the cages, deflecting droppings into the piles below.

Once a year, 2,000 tons of manure is hauled from the hen houses and spread on some of the 3,000 or so acres amassed by Stucke, his son Mark and his son-in-law Luke Osterloh. The manure is typically spread onto fields after the soybean harvest each fall, then chisel-plowed into the ground.

Manure demands intensive management. I understand why after spending a morning at the pullet house with Melvin and Mark Stucke cleaning dust-caked louvres and fan frames.

Inside enclosed walkways next to the pullet house's ventilation fans, flies blacken areas of the cool concrete floors, barely moving or motionless.

To control flies, the Stuckes spray the manure with an insecticide before spreading it on their fields. They use a feed additive called Larvadex to reduce the fly population in the houses, but only sparingly so the flies don't build resistance. They also try to establish colonies of darkling beetles, which eat fly larvae in the manure.

"They're very beneficial in the house," Melvin Stucke says of the beetles. "But they're a nuisance once you move the manure out of the house."

We finish cleaning the banks of fans at the pullet house shortly before noon. By then, the air has warmed and the flies are abuzz — everywhere.

During the short trip from the pullet house back to the main farm, we shoo flies from the cab of Stucke's pickup.

A ‘friendly’ molt
In April, the Stuckes halted egg production in House No. 1 by cutting the flock's feed by half and putting less protein in what remained.

The induced rest, called a molt, typically begins when the chickens are 65 weeks old, Melvin Stucke said. It lasts six to eight weeks, during which chickens lose lots of feathers. The house is kept dark for much of the day to discourage egg production and irritability among the birds.

The molt is meant to give chickens just enough energy to maintain themselves, but not enough to put toward producing eggs. After a molt, which occurs naturally in the wild, the chickens grow new feathers and resume egg production at a higher rate.

Animal rights groups have assailed the industrywide practice, saying that depriving chickens of feed is an inhumane way to eke more eggs from them. Under pressure, McDonald's required its egg suppliers to stop forced molts in early 2001. And the United Egg Producers this summer announced new animal welfare guidelines that included a "friendlier" molt ration. Most of the nation's largest egg producers are following the guidelines, though critics contend the voluntary measures do not guarantee better treatment for all birds.

Changes were made at Stucke Beef & Egg this summer. The birds in House No. 4 ate a new "friendly molt" ration for four weeks.

"It's a low-protein, low-salt feed," Melvin Stucke says. "About all that's in it is corn with just a little bit of poultry supplement and a small amount of calcium."

The molt in House No. 4 was a first for the Stucke family in another way: It was the first time the family molted a flock twice. With low prices making it hard to justify a new batch of hens, the family instead decided to coax more eggs from the hens in House No. 4. Most birds go to slaughter when they are two years old and their egg output tapers off. Many are shipped to a slaughter plant in Canada to become soup meat; others go to a rendering plant and become ingredients for animal feed.

The birds in House No. 4 have resumed production, and are now 122 weeks old.

Following an egg
An egg's journey to the supermarket begins when a chicken foot bumps it, sending it meandering down the cage's gently sloping wire floors.

Chances are good that it will make the trip without ever coming in contact with a human hand.

At cage's edge, the egg rolls onto a 4-inch-wide conveyor belt, which moves east at two to 10 feet per minute. An egg in House No. 4 will travel as little as a few inches or as much as 584 feet before it funnels into a "de-escalator," a descending escalator that cradles the egg between plastic fingers while lowering it to a conveyor 12 inches wide.

Eggs laid in House No. 4 transfer from that conveyor to a conveyor 18 inches wide in the walkway between House Nos. 2 and 3. The wider conveyor then transports the eggs and others from House Nos. 1 and 2 to the packing room, where they are prepared for shipping. Stucke Beef & Egg packages nest-run eggs — eggs that have not been sorted by size.

In the packing room, which smells of wet concrete, an electric eye mounted on the conveyor just above the eggs occasionally emits a shrill beep. That alerts employees if the eggs become too crowded and begin piling up as they round a curve and line up in an orientator.

Water warmed to 115 degrees washes the eggs, which then get a cold rinse. Used wash water is stored in a 33,000-gallon tank, then spread on a nearby alfalfa field.

After their bath, the eggs are candled — a job so called because it was once done by candlelight. At Stucke's farm, the worker who is candling leans over a table and scrutinizes eggs as they pass, 12 abreast, under lights.

The worker methodically grabs eggs that need to be rewashed, as well as jumbos and those that are slightly cracked. Eggs with damaged membranes, called "leakers," are hurled into 5-gallon buckets.

Just past the candling area, a machine called a denester dispenses plastic flats one at a time. A packing machine's clamshell-shaped fingers clasp eggs and set 30 in each flat. A machine then stacks the egg-filled flats six-high.

A second worker places the stacks of 180 eggs on a wooden skid. A dozen stacks — 2,160 eggs — together make one layer on a skid. A full skid has five layers — 10,800 eggs that weigh about 1,500 pounds. Jumbos and slightly cracked eggs are placed on the very top to keep breaks to a minimum.

A third employee uses a battery-powered forklift to move the skids of eggs to a 1,500-square-foot refrigerated room. The eggs are usually stored there at about 45 degrees for one to three days. Then they are loaded into refrigerated semi trailers, with 60 percent to 70 percent of the eggs bound for a breaker plant in Zanesville, where the eggs are cleaned, broken and shipped out in liquid, frozen or dried form.

The feed lot
Even if the Stuckes had no chickens, their farm still would house almost enough animals to require a state permit.

In addition to producing eggs, the Stuckes fatten beef cattle for slaughter. In April, they had 990 head of cattle — farms with 1,000 head are considered megafarms.

Livestock farms have become specialized in recent decades, but Stucke Beef & Egg is an exception. And four years of depressed egg prices have shown the wisdom of staying diversified.

Nearly 50 years after Melvin Stucke's father, Frank, got in the business of fattening cattle, the family feeds out 1,800 head annually. The cattle weigh about 800 pounds when they arrive at the farm by semi, 60 at a time. Most come from pastures in Virginia or the Carolinas, but some come from Kentucky or in-state. At Stucke Beef & Egg, the cattle's diet consists of corn glutton, dried corn, silage, high-moisture shelled corn, lime, protein additives, a bit of hay — and even a few eggs.

Every other day or so, a resourceful Melvin Stucke hauls buckets of broken eggs in the back of his pickup to feed to the cattle. He fills a plastic container with the mottled yellow liquid, which dribbles onto the cattle feed as it passes beneath on its way to the bunks. Feeding the broken eggs to the cattle is one way to get rid of them while still putting some of their nutritional value to use.

My first day at the farm, I help vaccinate a group of cattle that just arrived at Stucke Beef & Egg. Two hired hands and I herd the group of 60, a few at a time, into a sturdy corral of creosoted posts connected by 1-by-6 boards.

We treat the animals for viruses and shipping fever in a headchute at the end of the corral. Each animal also is treated with a de-wormer and gets a shot to help prevent overeating and indigestion from their new diet. An implant inserted in each animal's ear makes them gain weight more efficiently.

Twice each day, the cattle stand at two bunks measuring 300 feet and 250 feet long and devour seven to eight tons of feed. It takes 180 days or so for the Stuckes to fatten the cattle to 1,350 pounds — a rate of gain of about three pounds per day.

About 90 percent of the Stuckes' cattle are black, with a few Holstein beef feeders and Herefords mixed in. Better than half of the cattle yield certified Angus beef, Melvin Stucke says.

Each year, the Stuckes bed their cattle with more than 250 tons of straw and feed them about 750 50-pound square bales of hay.

A lagoon at the feed lot's south end holds up to 1.2 million gallons of manure and water that rain washes off the feedlot. "We don't push anything into it," Mark Stucke says.

Instead, the Stuckes haul manure from the feedlot once a week, weather permitting. Beef cattle on high-energy diets such as corn each produce about 80 pounds of manure per day. That means a herd numbering 990 produces about 277 tons of raw manure a week.

An uncertain future
When Melvin Stucke put up a high-rise hen house for 60,000 chickens in 1978, he was at the vanguard of the egg industry's consolidation.

Stucke even held an open house for his hen house. He recalls the community's reaction was mixed. One prominent local poultryman who was still gathering eggs by hand said something that stuck with him: "You're starting out with more layers than I've ever had, and you're going to put us out of business."

A generation later, that fortune-telling has come full circle. The Stuckes have four times more chickens than what they had in 1978. But now their egg business is competing against more efficient giants and enduring a fourth year of depressed egg prices.

In the early 1990s, when the Stuckes had 400,000 birds and processed eggs, their egg farm yielded profits of 50 cents to $1 per bird, Melvin Stucke says. Now the family's egg business is losing money; income from the cattle and crops subsidizes it.

Two years ago, the family gutted one of the farm's four high-rises after deciding that restocking it with birds was too expensive.

"We're trying to keep a couple houses open, but I can't tell you today how that's going to be done," Stucke says. "Profitability has shifted from production to processing, marketing and transportation."

Expanding into those areas comes with significant building, equipment and labor costs — costs that are often prohibitive for smaller egg farmers like the Stuckes.

"You have to have enough eggs to make it worthwhile," Stucke says.

Melvin Stucke processed eggs for 15 years, but he stopped in 1998 rather than spend $750,000 to replace worn, outdated processing equipment. Stucke figures he needed 750,000 birds to justify the cost. Besides, he says, it was hard to find good help outside his family. And to get processed eggs certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he would have had to spend more than $50,000 a year on an egg inspector.

But giving up egg processing has left Stucke Beef & Egg at a competitive disadvantage.

Stucke does the math: Every dozen eggs that leaves his farm costs his family a penny or two extra to pack and three to four cents extra to ship somewhere else to be graded. That means it can cost the family up to six cents more than some competitors to produce a dozen eggs — a huge difference in a business that measures profits in tenths of pennies.

To stay in business, Melvin Stucke may become a contract producer and give up a fundamental trademark of farming: independence.

"I've been independent for 65 years. It's hard to switch at this time," Stucke says. " . . . Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong, I've always liked to make my own decisions."

But today's industry isn't giving him or any other egg farmer much choice.

"The small independent," he says, "I don't think there's going to be too much of that left in another couple years."

[From the Dayton Daily News: 12.03.2002]