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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.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
The last time a chicken truly performed a natural behavior was one day before it was domesticated and everybody goes, "Well, why did we domesticate the chicken?" Chickens were domesticated because they had a defined social structure that could be modified to fit a different environment. So if you give the bird a cage, it's going to adapt its behaviors to that environment.
Greg Schonefeld:
Hey there. I'm Greg Schonefeld and this is Eggheads. If you've ever cracked an egg and wondered how that shell, that yolk, that color or that price came to be, this is the episode for you. Today we're talking to someone who's been in the egg industry longer than most of us have been alive.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
I am Dr. Ken Anderson. I am a William Neal Reynolds professor and poultry extension specialist at North Carolina State University.
Greg Schonefeld:
Dr. Ken Anderson is a poultry scientist and a professor at the Prestige Department of Poultry Science at North Carolina State University, but his journey in eggs started much earlier.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
I started in the egg industry when I was six years old.
Greg Schonefeld:
From there, he grew within the layer industry studying animal science and ag mechanization and working in both production and research before landing at NC State. Along the way, he picked up a master's and a PhD making him a self-described, highly educated chicken farmer.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
The one thing I've learned most definitely from a PhD is I don't know everything.
Greg Schonefeld:
That combination of industry experience and academic rigor has shaped his entire approach. Practical, grounded, and always evolving. Since 1966, there hasn't been a year he hasn't housed or shipped a flock. Today he takes us deep into the evolution of layer housing, egg safety, animal welfare, and what the future might hold during some seriously challenging times in the egg industry.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
There's always an alternative solution. Always. And it's just discovering what that solution is
Greg Schonefeld:
For Ken, discovering those solutions hasn't just been about theory, it's been decades of boots-on-the-ground research. One of his biggest contributions, a project called the Layer Performance and Management Test. It's a long-running trial where different breeds of hens are raised under various production systems such as caged, caged free, free-range, to see how they perform. Egg output, feed efficiency, shell quality, you name it, they measure it. So I asked him where did all this begin and what's been at the heart of his work?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
Something I guess near and dear to me has been poultry and egg production and that has been the major focus of my career. I was fortunate enough to come in and take over as director of the North Carolina Layer Performance and Management Test. I came in on the 28th layer test and we are currently in the middle of the 41st layer management test. Having access to birds of different genetic stocks, different ages, those types of things, and the eggs that they produce it's given me the opportunity to get heavily involved in egg processing and the food safety aspects of egg production and production systems. And then it's given me the opportunity to delve into human medicine. I spent 10 years working on using the chicken as a model for human ovarian cancer, and we did studies with DOD, NIH and National Cancer Institute, which was very interesting.
Greg Schonefeld:
Starting down that path never would've imagined it ended there or would that'd be a part of it.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
When I was collecting eggs out in the chicken house when I was 10 years old, no, I never dreamt that I would ... Didn't even dawn on the horizon that I would be doing what I'm doing or have done what I've done in my career.
Greg Schonefeld:
So maybe going in that progression you just laid out, I'd like to hear more about this layer performance management test.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
The Layer Performance and Management Test actually started in 1958. We would get different genetic stocks from the primary breeders and we would bring those in and they would be housed under the same production systems. The 28th layer test when I came in was basically looking at density and the impacts. And if you look at the evolution of the egg industry, 95% of the laying hens in the United States were kept in cages. Well, the big issue was the housing density in the cages, so that was the evolution. We started there and we were looking at different densities, giving them more space, less space, that type of thing. From there, the evolution was cage-free. So when we updated systems, we added cage-free production. And then within that evolution there was enriched colony cages. So ultimately by the time we were at the 38th test, we had conventional cages, we had enriched colony cages, and then we had cage-free. Further evolution so that we could encompass some of the new ideas for what consumers wanted. We went to free-range, so we added a free-range system as well. Basically the layer test evolved from all cages to actually having every production system that was available in the United States for the commercial industry. And we compared how the birds reacted or responded to those different production environments and how the different genetics responded to those different environments.
Greg Schonefeld:
So you came in, you said the 28th run of this. Is it one per year?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
They run every two and a half, three years because we used to molt birds. We would keep them in production for a little over two years. And there's always lead time between them to clean up and make modifications and that type of thing.
Greg Schonefeld:
Originally, the layer test focused on tracking egg production, feed efficiency and quality, but over time it's expanded to include shell strength, yolk color, and even how stress affects egg appearance. Ken and his team study how eggs change as hens age and how feed and environment can help preserve quality late in the laying cycle.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
In 1990, when I came, the chickens that we put in the layer test in 109 weeks produced about 440 eggs. In the last layer test, the breeds that we had in the 40th layer test produced 540 eggs in 109 weeks. So in the course of 30 plus years, we've improved by about a hundred eggs and that continues on. But what goes into that production is first of all, the production system. Is it a cage-free system? And a cage-free system is not just a cage-free system because you've got slat systems, slat litter, all litter. There's a number of variations within that.
Greg Schonefeld:
Are you running multiple variations?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
Well, we try and settle on one. For our cage-free. We run a slat litter system, and then for our free-range, the range houses have slats in the range house, but then the birds have 24/7 access to the outdoors. We have videos of chickens going out in snow-covered range paddocks to eat and forage. Chickens are unique animals. And then when you get into cage systems, so we have the old conventional cage which has a 17-inch cage height, and then we have the new conventional cage which has a 22-inch cage height, and the big difference between those is the behavior of the bird. So the old conventional cages, the chicken, when it stood straight up in the cage, its comb would actually touch the top of the cage, and the bird always had a sense of space. In the new conventional cage, when the bird stands up, its comb does not touch the top of the cage and they don't really get a sense of space around them. In the new conventional cage, there is a lot more flightiness and escape behaviors and the birds are much more fearful.
I hate to be anthropomorphic, but the chicken doesn't understand the sense of space and they're trying to get away from you, which is a normal behavior. Where in the old conventional cage, they always said, "Well, I can't go up, I can't go back." I won't say it was less stressful, but they didn't display as much fearfulness behavior in the old conventional cages. Then they threw the enriched colony cage in there, which was anywhere from 96 inches long to six feet wide. We provided them roosts in these enriched colony cages and we provided them nest areas, which were great. But here again, the sense of space. There were some birds that you do not want to put in that type of cage because I've actually seen birds literally take flight in the 96-inch cage and run into the wall. So behaviorally birds are different and they adapt to space differently. There are certain birds you really don't want to put into a cage-free setting. They don't respond well. Part of it is how you grow the bird, but part of it is the adaptability of the bird to a given environment.
Greg Schonefeld:
This move to cage-free, how the industry is going there today do you have a perspective here?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
I'll keep this friendly.
Greg Schonefeld:
Sure. You don't have to.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
I have thoughts that I tend to keep to myself. But the consumers today want assurances that the eggs are produced from hens that are kept in certain ways and the egg industry is more than willing to provide that consumer what they want. It bothers me that people that really don't know anything about chickens or how chickens behave and about production systems are the ones that started the drive towards all of this. So there's my controversial part.
Greg Schonefeld:
Sure.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
But these systems cost more. They cost more on a per bird basis to build. They cost more on a per bird basis to operate. They cost more in feed to produce the same number of eggs and they cost more in human labor to produce those eggs. So they were initially priced as a cost plus. Cost based on a conventional cage-produced egg and then this much added cost. Well, now cage-free eggs are a commodity. They have converted to a commodity. Supply and demand, so they actually cost much more. I was in a grocery store with my son out in Omaha, and even a conventional egg was 3.97 a dozen, and then when you get into the cage-free vegetarian, cage-free organic, you start going up into $6 a dozen, $8 a dozen, $10 a dozen for these different types of eggs. And this is the controversial part of it, and I'll get hate emails when this podcast airs. Whatever the chicken consumes, it digests the feed, it tears it apart into amino acids, and then it creates the proteins that go into the egg. So the chicken doesn't care what types of feed you give it. An egg is an egg.
Greg Schonefeld:
Now, Ken did concede that you can alter the nutritional content of an egg by feeding birds omega threes, omega six, vitamin E, that kind of stuff, and there are companies that do that. But I think we all see his point that by and large, an egg is an egg. These days though, the conversation seems to be less about nutritional value and more about animal welfare and with all his years spin around birds, I was sure Ken had an opinion on that as well.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
Both of my aunts and uncles had free-range chickens before I was six, so I used to sit in the milk house with my aunt and watch her clean eggs on a big old buffing wheel. Not washed and sanitized, but just buffed off, made it look clean and put in an egg carton for her egg route. We started the movement and actually in 1935 when cages were first developed. So we started a gradual move from free-range into cage production. And the big push began after World War II in that move from free-range cage-free, to cages I will admit that I think the egg industry took it too far. When my father built his egg operation, the cage density was 99 square inches per bird. From there to when I was a graduate student, it went down to 48 square inches per bird, an area six by eight. It's not a whole lot of space. And I think because we went too far, it gave the animal rights groups something to bite into and push back on, and it forced the egg industry to look at what they were doing from a bird welfare perspective. I wholeheartedly endorse that the egg industry needed to do that.
We started out giving birds more density or more space per bird, production per bird improved. But then the consumer goes, "Well, we want cage-free," which is fine. So the egg industry gave them cage-free. And then the organic group, they go, well, outdoor access. And then the conventional production system said, "Well, we're going to have free-range eggs." But as we moved from cages, we reintroduced a lot of the things that we got away from when we moved from free-range into cages. So when we were in cages, we didn't have trouble with fecal contamination of the egg, we didn't have problems with internal parasites, we didn't have as much trouble with external parasites. Now we're back where we have to figure out how to deal with roundworms, tapeworms, gapeworms. We need to figure out how to deal with bacterial contamination on the surface of the egg, but also we have to deal now with ... Because we know that salmonella and other bacteria colonize in the chicken ... The chicken doesn't care, but the people that eat the eggs that the chicken produce care about it. So now we're figuring in these different systems how do we produce a safer egg for the consumer?
But we've seen an evolution of the egg processing regulations to ensure better food safety. I think that's going to become more and more important as we are making a dramatic shift back to cage-free production because eggs from cage-free operations have the potential to not be as clean.
Greg Schonefeld:
You've seen all these different environments through your research studies. Do you have any insights on animal welfare or any misconceptions on that front?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
I think the biggest misconception is first of all, chickens are omnivores. As I say in my class, they will eat anything that they can swallow and that includes each other if given the opportunity. In a cage, we had what we call linear social structure in that there was a top bird, there was a bottom bird, and everybody knew their spot. But as you go to colony cages or cage-free where you have big expanses, you start getting very complex social structures. You'll get pecking triangles, pecking circles, even within a 10,000 bird floor house chickens set up a familial population and within the population they set up this social structure which helps the bird's behavior stabilize. But then on the fringes of each of these populations within a house, you've got interaction of two different populations and you have increased aggression in those subsets. All that is extremely complex, and to say that you can solve it by giving toys or enrichments or getaway spaces, it works for a little while, but it doesn't work long term.
Greg Schonefeld:
I know that ideologically Ken can seem a little hard to pin down. For me, I felt clarified when he summed up his perspective on the animal welfare debate like this.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
I'm an animal welfarist, I'm not an animal rightist.
Greg Schonefeld:
What's the difference?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
I have a moral obligation to take care of chickens to the very best of my ability. An animal rightist has a core belief that a chicken is a dog, is a cow, is a boy. And from my Judeo-Christian upbringing, we were brought here to utilize animals for our benefit, but with the moral obligation that we have to take care of their welfare as best we can.
Greg Schonefeld:
So to be an animal rightist, you have to get into the mind of the bird too, which is impossible, right?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
It is. I have been studying poultry behavior. I've watched 2,400 hours of chicken videos, so if anybody can jump into the head of a chicken, I probably could, but there's not much there. And people will argue with me about that statement too, but I'll argue back.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. So animal welfare means, you're taking care of the bird and how can you're doing that?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
One, is the bird productive? Is the bird healthy? Is the bird not responding negatively to you? And with those three things, that's how you're doing an okay job. I always look at Selye's work on stress. The grandfather of stress. The absence of stress is death. Everything that we do in life is stressful. Everything that chicken or a cow or a pig, their life is stressful, but the absence of that is being no more. What we do as a welfarist is to do the best we can to keep that animal as healthy and as productive as we can, and I've taken that to heart for 58 years.
Greg Schonefeld:
There's this argument I hear a lot when it comes to this cage versus cage-free debate, and it says that keeping chickens in cages is inhumane because it doesn't allow them to perform their so-called natural behaviors. Seems like a reasonable enough argument on its face, and when I asked Ken for his take on it, I never imagined his answer would get quite so philosophical.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
the last time a chicken performed a natural behavior is dependent upon when you believe that bird was domesticated. So if you look at Aldrovandi on Chickens, which was written in the 1400s, they say chickens were domesticated 3000 years ago. If you go to new research out of China and Indochina, it was 10,000 years ago. So the last time a chicken truly performed a natural behavior was one day before it was domesticated. And everybody goes, "Well, why did we domesticate the chicken?" Chickens were domesticated because they had a defined social structure that could be modified to fit a different environment. So if you give the bird a cage, it's going to adapt its behaviors to that environment. Chickens do dust bathing activity in a cage and now it's called sham dust bathing. They do foraging. They peck inedible objects. They move around the cage pecking at different things. They do head shaking, that type of thing. But it's behaviors adapted to that environment. Every time you change the bird's environment, the behavior patterns change for better or for worse sometimes as you give the bird more space, the behavior patterns change to the negative and for better or for worse, when you give them less space in a cage, the behavior patterns change to the negative. There is no perfect system.
Greg Schonefeld:
I take Ken's point here that there's no perfect answer to the animal welfare question and that every housing method has its pros and cons. Even keeping a small flock of chickens in your backyard would leave those birds vulnerable to attacks from predators. In fact, my dad once left me in the care of his chickens for a month or so, and I remember calling him and asking how many he had because something seemed off to me. He told me 24, and I went and counted 16. Upon further investigation, I found a small gap in the coop with chicken feathers stuck to it, which had allowed a raccoon to pay a couple visits under my watch. Point is maintaining animal welfare for chickens isn't as easy as one might think on the surface. Another part of the industry where Ken has been pretty plugged in, as he mentioned off the top, is on the egg safety side. He was involved in a lot of the research that informed what we now call the egg roll, an FDA regulation that established strict decontamination protocols for producers.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
At the end of the day, the egg safety rule is to reduce the incidence of salmonella in eggs or eliminate it reaching the consumer. That's the bottom line. If you're producing eggs for the consumer, the first thing you want to do is you want to collect your eggs as often as possible so they look as clean as possible. Okay. The next thing you want to do is you want to wash them properly. You want to wash them in warm water with a sanitizing detergent. Not Tide, not lemon fresh Dawn because eggs take on flavors, but a proper egg wash detergent. Once they're washed, you want to dry them as quickly as possible and then refrigerate them below 45 degrees Fahrenheit and maintain them at that cool temperature up to the point where the consumer buys them. That is the egg safety plan in a nutshell.
Greg Schonefeld:
So like in Europe, they don't wash their eggs. I understand.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
No. They don't wash their eggs, but they can only sell eggs that look clean.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
So they can't have any fecal material on them or anything like that. But, and here again, research an egg that looks clean still has 30,000 colony forming units of bacteria on the shell surface here in the United States in Canada and other countries that wash eggs, that bacterial load goes down to basically non-detectable. That's why we wash eggs to make them safer.
Greg Schonefeld:
Looking ahead, if you could set one priority for the egg industry in the next decade, what would it be and why?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
We are rapidly moving towards a problem in the United States, and they have it in Europe of space. That is physical landmass. In agriculture ... And this is all agriculture we are losing about two million acres a year to urbanization, and we cannot go back to old technologies that require space. We need to figure out how to do what we do and provide nutritious food to the population, utilizing as little space as we can. That's a controversial statement, but the reality is what it is. Germany, before they went to cage-free, they produced 70% of the eggs that they consumed. The next year they produced 30% of what they consumed and they had to import the other 70%. I don't want the egg industry to get to that point in this country.
Greg Schonefeld:
what can be done?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
Part of it is learning how to use the systems that we're being mandated to use, but the other part of it is get the government out of the business of regulating how we produce food. And I don't know how we can do that because the government always has their finger in it and people that think they know better appear to have the biggest voice or are the loudest background noise, and that's who the legislators listen to, unfortunately.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. So if there's strategies for that, we should be looking for them.
Dr. Ken Anderson:
The biggest one is the animal production sectors need to unite because we have a common cause, and the common cause is to produce good nutritious food for the population of the world.
Greg Schonefeld:
Having hosted this show for a while now and spoken to people from all different parts of the industry, I've learned about disconnects between the theoretical and the practical. Speaking to Ken was fascinating because he really bridges that gap. He's got the experience both being down in the trenches, aka the layer houses, and on the theoretical academic side, researching and in the classrooms. I know some of his views on cage-free production may be controversial, but I appreciate that his perspective is informed by a deep appreciation for the science of agriculture, the hard realities of egg production, and a deep connection to the industry that drives his desire to make it better. Special thanks to Ken for coming on the show to share that perspective with us. We've heard about his research into different housing methods, his contributions to egg safety protocols, his philosophies on animal welfare, but one extremely important question remains, how do you prefer your eggs?
Dr. Ken Anderson:
Oh, over medium. I like a runny center.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay. Good. Make sure you follow Eggheads on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and connect with us on Instagram and LinkedIn too. If you want to be a guest or have topic ideas, please send us a message. Until next time, I'm Greg Schonefeld and we'll talk to you soon.