Like many North Americans, Paul Wurz starts his day with an egg or two.
“I eat three eggs a day,” he said. “Fried, poached, or hard-boiled.”
Unlike most, he knows exactly where those eggs came from – the barn with its 20,000 hens is just down the street from his home.
“We do around 20,000 eggs per day,” he said, and they ship them to 80-odd stores and restaurants across the Edmonton region, including Socrates in St. Albert.
“We try to give them the safest quality eggs you can buy anywhere in the world.”
A lifelong egg farmer, Wurz, 63, is the egg barn manager at the Morinville Colony in Sturgeon County. Earlier this year, the colony won the 2018 Producer of the Year Award from the Egg Farmers of Alberta. It’s the second time the colony has won that award this decade, and the first time ever that the winner has done so with a perfect score; the award judges farms based on food safety, animal care, environmental stewardship and public engagement.
“It’s a rewarding feeling,” said Wurz, 63 – one that reflects the hard work he and his co-workers put into the farm.
The Gazette caught up with Wurz this month to see how local eggs get on Albertan plates.
Many eggs, few baskets
The Morinville Colony is one of just 170 registered egg producers in the province, said David Webb of the Egg Farmers of Alberta. All of those producers are family farms, and about 80 per cent of them are Hutterites. Those producers put out about 780 million eggs last year.
Most Alberta egg farms have about 15,000 birds each, giving them the smallest average flock size in Canada, Webb said. (American farms often host millions of birds.) This is largely the result of Canada’s supply management system, which since 1967 has kept a lid on the total number of hens laying at any one time and pegged that number to population.
Wurz supported supply management, saying that it keeps the price of eggs from crashing to the untenable $0.50 cents a dozen you see down in the States.
“We lose supply management, then you’re working for free.”
Supply management also lets Canada enforce strict biosecurity measures, Wurz said. The whole egg barn region is a restricted area on the colony, for example, and you can’t set foot inside the barns themselves without head-to-toe coveralls and shoe covers.
“I don’t want no disease in here,” Wurz said – one contaminated shoe can carry avian flu or salmonella, both of which can destroy your entire flock.
“We’re trying to sell safe, healthy food, and we want to keep it that way.”
The chicken came first
Wurz opens a frosted glass door and steps into the egg barn – a plain white room the length of a gymnasium with concrete floors and soft LED lighting. Three long shelves of cages stretch into the distance, each full of clucking and fluttering white chickens with red combs. Listen carefully, and you can hear few cockle-doodle-doos – Wurz has a few roosters in the barn keep the hens calm.
Wurz said the colony gets its birds from local hatcheries as day-old chicks and raises them in another barn. The birds move into the egg barn after 18 weeks and spend the next 1.5 years laying eggs, at which point they’re butchered and sold as meat. (Many farms kill and compost their birds instead, Webb said.)
Back when he was a kid, Wurz said birds would run around loose in the egg barn and hopefully lay eggs in nest boxes for people to retrieve by hand.
That’s impractical when you have 20,000 birds, so since the 1970s the colony has used a conventional cage setup that sees the birds spend their days living seven per cage. A mechanical arm sweeps across a trough in front of the cages five times a day to refill it with wheat, vitamins and minerals, while a drinking tube at the back provides water. A belt under the cages carts off the manure.
“In this system, they never have to worry about cold and no predators can get after them,” Wurz said, and they have all the food and water they want. The birds lay eggs regularly, suggesting they’re healthy and happy, and are protected from disease.
Still, modern research and consumer attitudes have led the Egg Farmers of Alberta to ban new conventional cage setups as of 2015, Webb said. The push now is to use free-run or free-range setups that let chickens run around inside and/or outside the barn, respectively, and to have all conventional setups phased out in 25 years.
“We want to be able to let the birds have as natural a life as possible,” Webb said.
This is a tough transition for farmers, as many have invested heavily in conventional systems, Webb said – about 68 per cent of Alberta’s egg barns are still conventional, and polls suggests 80 per cent of consumers prefer cheaper conventional eggs over free-range ones. Free range/run barns also carry more risk of bird-on-bird violence, exposure to outside pathogens, and death by stampede if the flock gets spooked.
Wurz said the colony has yet to determine how it will change its barn to meet future requirements, but he had reservations on the free-run approach.
“I don’t want to be picking eggs off the floor anymore.”
Getting the eggs
Wurz said he and his three crew members are up at 6 a.m. every day to inspect the birds in the barn, taking note of their health, food and water consumption. Any bird that looks sick or injured is taken to a separate cage for treatment. Crews inspect the birds at least twice a day.
“Most chickens lay their eggs anywhere from five o’clock in the morning to 9 to 10,” Wurz said, so his crew typically starts collecting eggs at 9 a.m. sharp.
The floor of the cages is tilted so that any eggs roll onto a conveyor belt, Wurz said. Flick a switch, and the belt drags the eggs off for grading.
Any egg intended for resale (e.g. at a store or restaurant) in Canada must be graded by a federally licensed grader. (Direct sales such as at farmers' markets are exempt.) While Webb said most egg farmers will have a major distributor such as Sparks or Burnbrae Farms grade their eggs, the Morinville Colony does so on its own.
Grading starts with washing, which Canadian law requires to prevent salmonella. (European farmers use vaccines instead of washing, which is why they can store eggs at room temperature; washing removes the bacteria-blocking cuticle from the egg.) Wurz said his crew did this by hand prior to 1978, but now have the conveyor belt drag the eggs through what is essentially a car wash.
Next comes candling. In the old days, Wurz said you’d do this by holding the egg up to a candle to see its insides. Nowadays, you examine dozens at a time with a light table and the conveyor belt. The inspector sets aside any eggs with cracks, blood spots, or other defects for sale as lesser “B” or “C” grade eggs, which are reserved for baking or processed products. Only “A” grade eggs (no cracks, centred yolk, small air pocket) make it past here for sale as whole eggs.
Next comes the sizing, which has been wholly mechanized at the colony since 2004, Wurz said. With ballet-like choreography, a train of hundreds of metal and plastic arms glides in as the eggs roll out of the candling machine and snatches them up.
“That’s got to be perfect timing,” he noted. “It can’t be out by even 1/100th of an inch.”
Each arm weighs its egg to determine its size (which range from peewee, or under 42 g, to jumbo, or over 70) then places it in the appropriate carton as it passes. Workers stack the cartons in boxes, load them in a truck and ship them to stores.
Wurz said it takes him and three others about 2.5 hours to collect and ship a day’s worth of eggs. He and his crew then have to wash and disinfect all the equipment and floors, dust and vacuum the barns, and fill out their paperwork and last-minute orders. Most days, they clock out at 8 p.m.
Wurz said he loves working with chickens, and enjoys seeing the birds stay healthy and happy every day.
“I know I’m supplying a nice, safe, healthy product for the public, and I kind of like that.”
