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Eggheads is the go-to podcast for egg industry professionals who are interested in leadership and innovation in the egg world. Host Greg Schonefeld explores the evolving world of modern egg farming, from the latest in cage-free innovations and organic certifications to navigating the economics of large-scale production. Whether you're an egg producer, supplier, or involved in poultry genetics, this show provides the insights and expert discussions you need to thrive in the industry. Crack open the science, strategies, and stories behind the egg industry’s biggest challenges and opportunities.
Neil Martin:
You just can't take any chicken from anywhere and expect it to lay a lot of eggs, even if you give it the best care, or the best feed, or whatever the case may be. So that's why we have almost 70 years of genetic progress in egg type chicken breeding across the globe.
Greg Schonefeld:
I'm Greg Schonefeld, and this is Eggheads. It takes a skilled and attentive producer to grow a healthy and productive flock, but much like a high performance car needs the right engine, a high performance flock needs the right genetics. And ironically, for our guest today, genetics seems to be, well, in his genes.
Neil Martin:
So my dad went to Virginia Tech in the late 1950s, early '60s. And when he got there, he met a young professor named Dr. Paul Siegel. My dad said that when he taught the poultry genetics class, he wasn't a very good student of Siegel's. And little known fact, that Dr. Siegel could write with both hands. And in that time, they were using the chalkboard, and he would literally have two pieces of chalk in his hand and be writing on the board at the same time. And my dad said that he dropped his pencil one day in class and missed two pages of notes. And he still tells that story today.
Greg Schonefeld:
The voice you're hearing is Neil Martin, who's now the general manager of US operations for Hendrix Genetics. 60 years ago, Neil's dad was an undergraduate student, and Dr. Paul Siegel, who's now a distinguished professor, was a young PhD candidate. And while studying under him, the elder Martin saw the start of a fascinating experiment.
Neil Martin:
He started a study where he was taking a look at breeding chickens that were the very biggest birds. He bred them together. And he took the very smallest birds, all from the same family, and bred them together.
Greg Schonefeld:
Over time, these two groups of birds became dramatically different, with the bigger group weighing 8 to 10 pounds more than the smaller one.
Neil Martin:
What this showed was a powerful influence of genetic selection.
Greg Schonefeld:
And Dr. Siegel's experiment didn't end after just a few generations, it actually continues to this day.
Neil Martin:
Dr. Siegel still hangs out on the research farm, making sure that this 68-year-old experiment is still ongoing. But it's the fundamentals of genetic selection. And Dr. Siegel has probably got a student, I'm sure he does, on every major genetic poultry staff in the world.
Greg Schonefeld:
And one of those students is Neil himself. But as his experience demonstrates, genetics aren't everything.
Neil Martin:
Siegel said I was a better student than my father, but I did not choose to specialize. I'm a production person, and I don't pretend to be a geneticist, but I have been around a lot of poultry genetics over the years.
Greg Schonefeld:
Neil's dad did choose to specialize though, and he went to work for DeKalb Poultry Research, traveling constantly to different hatcheries across the country. Until he had the opportunity to buy an operation in Virginia. And at that point, he was able to stay in one place, producing day-old chicks as a franchisor for DeKalb.
Neil Martin:
So I grew up around the hatchery and chickens and the breeding stock from a very early age.
Greg Schonefeld:
Today, you'll come to understand the incredible impact genetics can have on egg production, how it works, how it's evolved over time, and how the industry is working to make birds more resilient to the challenges of modern egg farming.
Neil Martin:
So when my dad started this entrepreneurial effort, obviously, he needed parent stock breeding farms to produce the hatching eggs for the hatchery. And a lot of the ones that he had bought from Mr. Clay were kind of run down. And so my first experience was in my teenage years where he was building new farms, the commercial producers were asking for larger and larger flocks. So as you need larger commercial flocks, you also need larger breeding flocks that will supply the chicks. Because customers want all their chicks preferably in one day, but at that time, we needed to at least be able to produce the order sizes within one week. And when you look back to those 1940s and '50s, a chicken was laying like 150 eggs a year. When I came into the business, they were laying like 250 eggs a year. And then at that time, I thought genetic progress would slow down.
Well, now, I'm an old timer, and 40 years later, they're laying 300 eggs per year. And it's 360 days in a year, so that they're not taking off many days. And Hendrix tells me that there's more potential.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah, that's unbelievable. And it's not just egg numbers that have changed over the years. In the early days of the industry, especially after World War II, things were much less consolidated, and the US was filled with backyard chicken breeders, all of them competing over who had the most productive flock.
Neil Martin:
It's interesting to look at an old poultry tribune or an old poultry magazine. And when you're going through these things, you see all these people posting the successes that they had with this flock or that flock of chickens. "My chickens laid 200 eggs." "Well, mine laid 202." And there were all these contests that were happening at both the local and the state level. And so everybody sort of had their own breeding programs. And so it was a bit chaotic, but very exciting because I think there were a lot of farm families, or families in general, that realized that they could produce their own eggs. And it might be not only that, they could produce a few for their neighbors. And so it grew. Then there are these poultry breeders all over the place and they thought their birds were the best. So there were eight large genetic companies in the United States when I came into the business in the 1980s. And now, there's really three. There's only really three. There's a German company, there's a Dutch company, and then there's a company that has genetics from Hungary.
Greg Schonefeld:
And that's worldwide, three?
Neil Martin:
Yes. Yes. Yeah, predominantly. Of course, China always does its own thing. But yeah, predominantly, there's really only three.
Greg Schonefeld:
So getting to only three today from eight, that was consolidation. How about getting from what you painted in World War II to the eight? Was there something key that took place there?
Neil Martin:
Yeah, I would say the biggest thing, these eight companies started to really acquire genetic lines, whether it was in the United States or around the world, they started to buy up these good genetics, these birds that were high performers that were winning the contest type of thing. And so it's all about hybridization. So if you bring enough diversity to the gene pool, there's always room for improvement. So the geneticists tell me today that as long as there's still diversity within the lines, there will be continued improvement. And so there's still quite a bit of diversity left. So we'll continue to see more egg numbers, more longevity, other improvements and characteristics.
Greg Schonefeld:
And to get that diversity in their flocks, some breeders would resort to duplicitous strategies.
Neil Martin:
A lot of breeders stole chickens from other breeders. They would sneak in and take breeders so that they could bring some new blood to their crosses. So there's a lot of discussion about that happening, especially in the '60s and '70s while it was still kind of rogue breeding wars. There's talk that you could do some DNA checks to see that maybe some of the lines that are at one of the large breeding companies today may have come from one of the lines that's at the other one. So that's a reality.
Greg Schonefeld:
Back in those early days, people would raise chickens for eggs, and as soon as they came to the end of their egg laying lives, they'd eat them. But a major inflection point in the development of modern genetics came when people realized there were different traits that were better for layers, and some that were better for broilers.
Neil Martin:
Yeah, it's nice and efficient to have one chicken to try and do everything, but I think once they realized that you could select for body weight and body confirmation, bigger breasts, bigger thighs, then you needed to develop a broiler chicken for that specific market. And when you did that, it wasn't a good egg producer. Body weight has a negative correlation for egg production. So as you keep selecting for more body weight, they're not as good a layers anyway. So when you select for egg production, then you get a skinny chicken.
Greg Schonefeld:
Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, that it actually... you can't sit there and say, "Hey, I want to make the perfect chicken that is fat for me and lays eggs." It's like it literally works against each other.
Neil Martin:
Yeah. And even in today's world where we've been breeding for egg production for a long time, there's no one fit chicken for everybody. I love to say it's ours, and ours do fit a lot of various scenarios around the world and in the United States, but it depends on customer's market, the type of housing and equipment that they have, the type of management that they're able to apply to it. So it can be very unique. Someone can find a bird that works very, very well for them, and they wouldn't want to change just because a salesman came by and tried to sell them the next best thing.
Greg Schonefeld:
So maybe jumping to today, can you walk us through how the breeding pyramid works?
Neil Martin:
Yeah. I'll keep it as short as I can. So at the very top, so you have pure lines. So these pure lines of chickens, so that's where you really do the genetic selection work. So you can think of these very small, highly controlled populations. And then as we move down, we multiply those birds through great-grandparents, grandparents, parent stock, and then ultimately, the commercial stock. And the hybridization, the most hybridization is really happening at the last cross, the parent stock level, where you take this bird and you cross it with this bird. And I'll just use a really simple example. If this bird was laying 300 eggs per year based on its family history, and this bird over here was laying 300 eggs based on its family history, and you cross the two together, then you might get 305 eggs from its progeny. And so you're remembering that you've got the very elite birds at the top where we're trying to produce millions and millions of commercial layers at the bottom. So it's all about multiplication.
Greg Schonefeld:
Where do those pure lines come from?
Neil Martin:
So they're kept in very biosecure environments. In the case of our company, we have them in the Netherlands. We also have them in France. And we have security all over the world so that if something were to happen to any of them, say, avian influenza or some other catastrophe, we have duplicates of these birds around the world. In the US, we get most of our genetic stocks directly from Canada, but Canada gets theirs from the Netherlands. So they are at a whole different level of sanitation and biosecurity.
Greg Schonefeld:
These purebreds, they're not from one family, right? We're talking kind of like a line of breed?
Neil Martin:
Really super good question. So it sounds like they're just like these birds and then they would get old and they would disappear. So in reality, a pure line is really more like a fixed group of birds. So it's a continuous population. So every generation, we're selecting the best birds within that line and breeding them to create the next generation of the same line. So the individual birds come and go, but the genetic line itself constantly is being renewed and improved over time. What you're really trying to do is you're trying to bring forth the best characteristics that you possibly can. Because if you inbreed, inbreeding generally has a tendency to bring up recessive type genes that are not obvious, but they show up when you take two animals that have been highly inbred. And so with a carefully designed genetic program by bringing in, like I said, sort of hybridization or bringing in some different... you're masking those traits. They won't get a chance to really exhibit themselves or be a part of the next generation. And so that's really what the geneticists get paid to do to do that quite well.
Greg Schonefeld:
As you're optimizing on the pure lines, you can probably run data on the hen and see how that hen lays, and those are the ones that you want to optimize with. What about the rooster? How do you know if you have a good rooster?
Neil Martin:
That's a great question. That's a great question. So they have to do tests on the rooster so that they can find out if they would produce females from their side that would bring the right characteristics. So it gets a little complicated for me, Greg, but you asked a wonderful question, like how do you measure egg production in a rooster? But you have to really look at it from that family. So you'd have to consider the females from that family.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. I imagine data collection is a big part of doing this, right?
Neil Martin:
Oh my gosh. It's all about it. Yeah. It's amazing all the data that they keep. And of course, a lot has gotten better for sure. And that's why I think genetic progress continues to get better. There used to be a lot more risk in the decisions that were made because there wasn't enough good data, and then you had DNA testing.
Greg Schonefeld:
So this is already complicated and then I want to add another layer, which is that... because now, you're optimizing for different things. Can you just talk to some of the traits you're optimizing for?
Neil Martin:
Yeah. So egg production, for a long time, that was the single goal. But then we realized we needed something more balanced. It's great, you could have a line of chickens that lays an egg every single day as long as it's alive, but if it has a tendency to die, it's worthless to you. Or if it lays an egg every single day, but it's the size of a marble, then you're no good. So it's all about balance. Most of the characteristics that are important today, obviously, egg numbers are important, but shell quality, feed efficiency, egg color, egg size, depending on your market, you may need a bigger egg, and obviously, we have a product for that, but you have to get paid a premium or you don't want to feed the chicken for that.
So yeah, it's very, very specific. And you can go deeper. Interior quality is important for people who sell shell eggs to, say, high-end restaurants, so they want to be able to whip those eggs up, and you want to be able to get them to froth and do the things that the bakers need them to do. It's really important. So interior quality is something that we focus on quite a bit too. But yeah, it's all about balance.
Greg Schonefeld:
Egg size, shell quality, even frothiness. These are all the things that can be selected for in a coordinated breeding program. But it's not always easy to get these chickens to express the attributes you're looking for, and certain traits are much more difficult to express than others.
Neil Martin:
Some traits are not highly heritable. You can't change something very quickly by just crossing two birds together to get quick results. Some things you can. Egg size, you can change superfast, but you have to be careful because you don't want to bring along some other trait that's related that you didn't know about. But things like improvement in hatchability, like how well do they hatch for me at the parent stock level, that's a very, very slow selection. And so heritability for every trait has a number from zero to one or something. And so one being 100% heritable, but some traits are maybe only 10% heritable. So yeah, so you don't make dramatic changes on certain characteristics.
Greg Schonefeld:
And the types of traits that producers are looking for have shifted according to changes in the industry, including, most notably, the shift to cage-free production.
Neil Martin:
For a long time, we selected birds that adapted and lived well in cages because it was the primary way that eggs were produced in the US. And we have had this full swing, at least 50 or 60% of our birds are now cage-free. So then all the genetic companies had to figure out how to create a chicken that lived in an open environment, on the ground, needed to be more robust, needed to actually work harder to produce eggs than it did before. So none of us were really prepared for it. So it was trial and error. But we took the same old birds and used them in these environments, and then we started to learn this isn't working very well. So obviously, we have different lines of chickens that we sell, so some of those lines seem to be naturally more adaptable. So then we started to put selection pressure, and doing the breeding program that way.
A lot of these pure lines all live in an individual cage. Each bird has its own cage so that you can monitor and measure everything very specifically on that particular bird. So even the research has been done in cages, so we've had to move towards doing colony or group housing for those birds as well.
Greg Schonefeld:
And then with cage-free, does livability become a more important trait? Just like the ability to... I don't know, physical strength or that sort of thing?
Neil Martin:
No, you're exactly right. So robustness, it's a very generic term that we use a lot, but there's a whole lot of things that come into play. One is they have to be more immune to... They're exposed to a lot more. The environment's not quite as clean as it was. It's a little dustier in a floor barn. And then when you start dealing with a floor environment, you can't control parasites as well, you can't control other diseases as well. So we've seen coccidiosis become a bigger problem for us. We've seen E. coli become a bigger problem for us. Worms is something you just don't really experience with a cage bird. And then yeah, they live in these tiered systems so that... Egg producers are smart. They said, "Okay, we go cage-free, but we'll create this jungle gym for the chickens to live in and so that we can provide them with the space that we think that they need for this happy environment.
So they got to figure out how to climb up into these systems. Sometimes, they come down and they have what they call crash landings, and they hurt themselves. Because egg type chickens are not the best... they're not eagles or hawks, they don't fly very well. And so their bone strength is critical. Can they handle the pressure of climbing through these systems and getting back down? So we see more like keel bone breaks and things like that.
Greg Schonefeld:
And then as chickens move out of cages and into spaces where they can freely mingle with one another, socialization obviously becomes a very important factor.
Neil Martin:
Yeah. You want birds that can get along with each other, which is in a caged environment, even cages from the past where you had either six birds in a cage, or five birds in a cage, they get used to their cage mate. Pecking order is a real thing. And so once they establish that, everybody knows when they can step up to the feed trough, they take their turns. But every day, it's like being in a prison, and you move the guys from cell block 13, a few of them into cell block 10. It's fight club. And every day, reestablishing the pecking order in these larger populations puts a lot of stress on the chickens that you didn't account for before. So there's a lot of energy that goes into that, so you got to feed them differently. Yeah. And then of course, feather cover becomes even more important because chickens have a tendency to be little cannibals, and they're little dinosaurs, and they like to peck if there's an opportunity. So if there's something to peck at, they will. So having good feather cover has become an important characteristic for us.
Greg Schonefeld:
It sounds like cage-free had a major impact on genetic selection, the robustness, even temperament, it sounds like, matters quite a bit, and then feather coverage would just be three examples of how it changed things.
Neil Martin:
It really has. And I don't think we're there yet. I think if most genetic companies are on us, we're still trying to get better. We're still taking cage chickens that we developed for the last 60 years, and now, try to have something more specific for that market.
Greg Schonefeld:
With all of this complexity when it comes to breeding, you can understand why most farms schedule their orders months, if not years, in advance, and the recent uptick in HPAI outbreaks has only made things more complicated.
Neil Martin:
You talk to me during a time that's the most unique in my entire career, especially the last four or five years, because of high path avian influenza, especially because of that and really coming on the heels of going cage free, and there was a lot of doubt about what type of housing people were going to build. Egg prices have been super good for a while. We're grateful that our customers give us their expectations for orders as much time out in the future as possible. But yeah, we are more or less sold out. And of course, now, we're experiencing some lower egg prices because of now the decline of high path AI currently. So we find ourselves with a large population of chickens laying eggs in a tough time for the egg business. So yeah, there's going to be some adjustments. So yeah, if you call us, maybe we have an opening, we had a cancellation or something like that. But we've been very, very fortunate, it hasn't been that way my entire career, and I haven't always had as good a genetics as I have to work with today.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Yeah, you said once upon a time, you maybe wouldn't know if you're going to have a chick order next month, and that's really changed over time.
Neil Martin:
Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah, it's unbelievable, which is good. It's really good planning for everyone's sake, because we have to make those decisions on the parent stock long before, and we want our utilization to be as good as possible. And so yeah, in order to make any money in the business, you have to be fully utilized. And the same goes for our customers. They got to sell every egg that they have at a reasonable price. Otherwise, if they sell them... if they have to dump them at a discount, then that's not healthy for anybody. And obviously, it trickles down. So yeah, we're making our placements for breeders two and three years ahead, planning on what the expectation is for growth. Breeding stock is not cheap. We pay for this genetic progress that we're getting to get an improvement year over year of two or three eggs per chicken, which is kind of how we've been running.
It's not free. So customers don't like it when we say, "Hey, we need to charge you a little more because we're investing all this in research and development," but we are delivering more and more to the customer year over year. So as you would expect, you'd like to get a little more for your product.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah, you're managing all that parent stock, trying to get those flock sizes up where they need to be to produce the ultimate flock size you need.
Neil Martin:
Yeah. Now, you can't adjust to the market very quickly. That's the problem. It takes at least two to three years to bring a new genetic trade or improvement to market. And so yeah, as far out as we can get information, and then the better for us.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. I guess that's a topic that's been indirectly raised on the show, but during HPAI, that's one of the bottlenecks to we're losing all these birds, well, you can't just get the chicks you need overnight. There may be construction or there may be other constraints, but this is definitely one of them.
Neil Martin:
Yeah, absolutely. No, and that's been the story that we've been a part of for the last three or four years. That's the story in the whole market.
Greg Schonefeld:
As Neil mentioned, now, genetics companies have a trove of data on every bird, and that's taken a lot of the risk out of the selection process. But that wasn't always the case. And in the past, there were many companies where bad breeding decisions had calamitous impacts.
Neil Martin:
Bad management decisions, somebody took their eye off the ball, somebody wanted to get a quick correction like, "Hey, we need more egg size, so let's cross this chicken with this chicken and we'll get more egg size in the next generation." And if there was a lot of pressure on a breeding company to do that, and there wasn't a lot of pushback from upper management, say, "Hey, let's take it slow. Let's take it easy." Those things really happened. And the other thing that was the biggest factor for me, I came up through that period of time when everybody was going from vent sexing, that's when you look at the cloaca of the baby chick and determine whether it's a boy or a girl, it takes a very highly specialized sexer, trained sexer, to determine that.
When we went from vent sexing to feather sexing, when you have bred a fast feathering gene into the genetic program. So when the parents stock are crossed, the male and the female, it produces fast feathering on the primaries and the coverts of the wing. It kind of looks like this, this is a girl, and this is a boy.
Greg Schonefeld:
So they were doing that to make the chick sexing easier?
Neil Martin:
And cheaper.
Greg Schonefeld:
And cheaper.
Neil Martin:
Obviously, cheaper. Yeah. You were paying and faster and faster, all related to efficiencies.
Greg Schonefeld:
But going down that road hurt other key traits?
Neil Martin:
Absolutely. It sure did. There were a lot of traits tied to that particular gene change.
Greg Schonefeld:
And so then the risk is to go down this path of too far of, man, maybe there's a fad that, oh, people want super jumbo eggs or something like that. And if you went too far down that road and then the market changes, you might have a tough time getting those genetics back where they were?
Neil Martin:
Yeah. And that's why we're always providing marketing feedback from our customer, "What do you need? What do you want?" And getting that back in the hands of the geneticist. Have we gone too far with egg size? Do we need to level it out? Because a lot of times, that was always the push. You want to get chickens to large eggs because that's sort of a premium product, mediums and smalls is just too big a differential and what they're willing to pay for those in the market. So you want to get to large as fast as you can, but you don't want to produce jumbos, because jumbos generally don't get much of a premium in the market, and the chicken eats a whole lot more feed to produce it. So you want to go up and then you want to level it off.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. So as a genetics company, you could almost listen to the customer too much and hurt yourself long term?
Neil Martin:
Yeah. Especially if your genetic progress hasn't showed up yet. They're like, "Hey, we need more egg size." Well, they're still looking at two years ago genetics, right?
Greg Schonefeld:
Mm-hmm.
Neil Martin:
Yeah. So we can say, "Well, it's in the pipeline. It's coming." But in the meantime, there are a host of things that you can do with management. You can light them differently, you can feed them a little differently. So there's definitely management can come into play and make a big difference for you.
Greg Schonefeld:
So if a customer says, "Hey, I want a larger egg," like you just mentioned, what does it take to make that happen, or how long does it take?
Neil Martin:
Well, the first thing we would do is, is he the only one? So yeah, we're not going to develop or change something for a minority. So it has to be sort of a big emphasis from a lot of different customers for something like that. There are options for us. Like I said, we have a huge gene pool at Hendrix Genetics. There are lots of options for us. There's certainly bigger egg options. So that would be one that we would say, "Hey, this chicken produces a better egg." But yeah, we tried to keep the number of line options closer to what we think the market needs. And we're not trying to dictate it, but we're trying to get a read. Could we have more options? More options is always better. I think that's the biggest downside to all the consolidation that's occurred. Even though all of these lines are involved in these three companies that are left, I just don't think you had that sort of individual focus on each line that you would if it was being developed and worked on by itself, but those lines are there.
And in other parts of the world, certain breeds that we don't even sell here in the US are very popular. So we get data, and we can look at it and if something that looks attractive, looks like a good fit for the US market, then we could bring it here.
Greg Schonefeld:
Just overall, I'm amazed at the role genetics plays, from disease to adapting to cage-free, to all the different traits. A lot's gone into this. I can only imagine the data that's been collected in the studying. It's pretty amazing. I used to like thoroughbred horse racing, and it seems like these birds these days are like thoroughbreds on steroids for what they do.
Neil Martin:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But we don't use steroids.
Greg Schonefeld:
Just data and process and... yeah. Oh my gosh, that's funny. I've got to be careful with my analogies here.
Neil Martin:
No, that's good. I corrected you. You're good.
Greg Schonefeld:
Neil, I have just one last question for you. How do you prefer your eggs?
Neil Martin:
Scrambled with cheddar cheese.
Greg Schonefeld:
Ooh, baby, that's good. Yeah. Simple and delicious.
Neil Martin:
Yes, sir.
Greg Schonefeld:
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a colleague or friend. Word of mouth really helps us to grow the show. And to make sure you don't miss an episode, follow us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Until next time, I'm Greg Schonefeld, and we'll talk to you soon.