Retail interest in cage-free eggs gained additional momentum in April, and Texas egg producers are already making investments in new housing systems to meet the future demand.
H-E-B announced in April it’s working toward selling only cage-free eggs by 2025. The San Antonio-based grocer follows the lead of Brookshire’s, Kroger and Walmart, among others. Most have targeted 2022 or 2025 as desired dates of transition for their egg purchases.
“It will come down to if a company can afford the costs of the new unit,” said James Grimm, executive vice president of the Texas Poultry Federation. “Once we go cage-free, people need to understand that we’re going to see an increase in prices, because it’s going to cost more to produce a dozen eggs. Retail outlets will pass on the increased costs.”
Grimm said a new cage-free housing system he toured in Texas featured a split level, with 50,000 birds on the top floor and 50,000 birds on the bottom floor. Feeders, waterers and nest boxes were positioned in the middle of the house. Conveyer belts transported the eggs laid in the nest boxes. The floor of the house rotated slowly so that litter is collected in a pit at the other end. A revolution of the floor is completed in a week.
There was an average of 20.4 million layers in Texas in March. The birds produced 264 million eggs, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture report.
“There is enough time for egg producers to transition to new systems, based on the timeframes announced,” Grimm said. “Most of the houses in Texas were built in the mid-to-late ’80s or reconfigured during that time. The transition will be productive for the larger operators to do it.
Reports indicate, for the first time in decades, the sales of cage-free housing systems in the U.S. in 2015, in terms of number of hens that can be housed, exceeded spaces sold for cage housing. If all the cage-free systems that are expected to be installed by the end of 2016 were fully stocked, the U.S. would have about 19 million more cage-free layers than it had in September 2015.