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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.
Bruce Dooyema:
Half of the world, 50% of the population is probably eating less than 50 eggs per person per year. So we got a lot of work to do of getting egg production up going around the world. There's a lot of growth potential.
Greg Schonefeld:
I'm Greg Schonefeld and this is Eggheads. Sometimes you talk to someone and think, "Man, this person doesn't just work in the egg industry. They live and breathe it." Well, that's exactly how I felt with today's guest. And as is so often the case, he can trace the roots of that passion back to his parents.
Bruce Dooyema:
I asked them for 12 chickens one summer when I was in seventh grade for a summer project.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's Bruce Dooyema, and he's come a long way from raising a few chickens in his backyard to becoming director of strategic projects at Versova, an agricultural cooperative that includes several massive layer operations spanning multiple states. But it all started with that extremely successful summer project.
Bruce Dooyema:
And so they got me 24 instead that summer. And then the next summer, that turned into building a chicken house of 60,000 birds back in 1978.
Greg Schonefeld:
I know what you're thinking. Going from a few dozen birds to 60,000 in one year, those must have been some prolific chickens, but there was a bit more to the story.
Bruce Dooyema:
We used to be a dairy farm, so we had a little bit of everything, right? We had steers, we had dairy, we milked 60 cows, we had a hog operation. My dad in his spare time was an electrician. So when I was in seventh grade, my dad got asked to wire a chicken house for his wiring buddy, and he put up a 30,000 bird chicken house. And I can remember riding home. They had open house. My mom said to my dad, "That looked pretty fun maybe to have some chickens." And my dad says, "I've been thinking the same thing. How about we go to the bank tomorrow and see what the banker has to say?"
Greg Schonefeld:
That was back in the late '70s. And from there, their egg business continued to grow and that was thanks in part to a bit of adversity.
Bruce Dooyema:
So what happened in 1986 was our dairy barn burned down. So dad wanted to rebuild the dairy and my brother Eric and I said, "No, dad, we're going to build another chicken house." So at that time we put up chicken house number two and that was an 80,000 birdhouse.
Greg Schonefeld:
In the '80s, the egg industry was seeing a lot of consolidation and the Dooyemas knew that even 140,000 birds wasn't going to give them enough economy of scale to keep up.
Bruce Dooyema:
Because quantity speaks for itself, right? When an egg company can come and pick up truckloads of eggs on a daily basis, that talks.
Greg Schonefeld:
So they set their sights on a million birds and their strategy for reaching that milestone was collaboration.
Bruce Dooyema:
Jim Rich from Midwest United Egg Producers back then came to us and visited and said, "Hey, you need to start coming to IPPE in Atlanta." So I started going to these shows and that's where I got to know people in the industry. And through that, I met the big Dutchman salesman, I met Jim Dean and we kind of became friends. And so in 1995, the big Dutchman salesman says, "Hey, I got a few friends that we could collaborate together." So that's how Center Fresh started. It was a group of eight people. Everybody had their own specialty. Jim Dean specialized in marketing. Blair Van Zetten was an eggbreaker. Coke Anderson was a pullet producer. She grew pullets and Bosma Poultry, they trucked eggs. And so we formed that partnership. Everybody had their specialty. The original intent was to put up four buildings of 133,000 and by the time we got done leveling dirt, why we had pads for six buildings instead.
So all of a sudden we had 880,000 extra birds plus our 140, so we're right at a million birds then.
Greg Schonefeld:
So that's the origin of Center Fresh, which has since joined with several other companies to form Versova, the large cooperative where Bruce works now. Today he's going to take us inside that merger and discuss the difficult logistics of keeping all these operations running smoothly through disruptions like HPAI or economic downturns. And we also discuss how he's taking his passion for eggs and exporting it abroad through the International Egg Foundation, which helps establish layer operations in regions of the world that struggle with food and security.
Bruce Dooyema:
Versova came about in 2015. Versova is a family of different egg companies around the country. So Versova, we have operations in Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah. But the cool thing about Versova and Center Fresh has grown through the years from, we really started growing in 2004. That's when we expanded from one million to four million birds, Center Fresh did. And then after that, we purchased We3 Eggs, which is a 1.7 million operation. And then Centrum Valley Farms in Central Iowa would be Jack DeCoster operation. And then the Ohio Operation Trillium came on. Michael Foods came to us. "Hey, can you buy this operation?" Morning Fresh came to us. "Can you buy our..." All these companies have come to us and said, "Hey, we want to get out of the egg business or I need to retire," that type of thing. Or, "We're cages and we got to convert to cage free, but we don't want to stick the money in it. Can you buy us and we'll give you a contract and you take care of switching it over." So it's really cool.
Greg Schonefeld:
I imagine if we're talking about going from 60,000 birds to a million, and then now during this growth that you're talking about where you've acquired more and more farms, you've gone from a million birds to how many?
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah, it's somewhere... 40 million birds.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. So we're talking a whole new game of, let's say economies of scale or just scale in general. Can you talk to some of those advantages?
Bruce Dooyema:
So if you think about it, if everybody was separate that you'd have to have a veterinarian for each company, you'd have to have a nutritionist for every company where now we can hire the talent and spread the expenses and the talent across all the operations. And you don't have this hierarchy thing where you got top down management. I'd like to say our companies are bottom up type. If somebody's got a good idea in a company, we're willing to hear it. We want people to come forward with their ideas of if we can do something better, we want to do it better. If we can do it more efficiently, we want to do it more efficiently. And that's the beauty of Versova.
Greg Schonefeld:
Well, I think that gives us a really good overview of Versova. And I'm curious, what is your role within Versova today?
Bruce Dooyema:
In 2008, we decided to get into growing our own pullets and we had to find a pullet manager. So Jim and I and JT, we tried to find a pullet manager after interviewing a few people. We couldn't find anybody. And Jim and JT came to me and said, "Bruce, you got to be our pullet manager." And during all those years from '78 to 2008, I said, "I never want to be a pullet grower because I love doing layers. I never wanted to do this." But I said, "All right, I'll do it on one condition." There's one employee that we hired six months ago, his name's Jamie Vander Helm. And I said, "I want him on my team," because he grew up raising pullets, so he's got experience. And through that, I learned how to do pullets.
Greg Schonefeld:
What does that mean to learn pullets? I mean, if you're a layer guy, what do you need to learn to learn pullets?
Bruce Dooyema:
Well, I would say when you get layers, as long as you give them feed, as long as they have water, as long as they have air, proper airflow and stuff, they're going to lay eggs and you got good feed quality and all that. With pullets, it's a whole different game. I mean, you got to have that feed, light, air, water, sanitation stuff, but you're taking a baby chick that's one day old, putting them in a chicken house. Now all of a sudden, I got to have temperature control, I got to have environmental controls. That chick needs 92 degrees to start out, 21 hours of light, sometimes 24 hours of light, and you got to back that light down to 10 hours of light during the grow period. You're basically handling a baby from day old to 16 weeks old when you move them into the chicken house.
And then you got to vaccinate them for a lot of different things. I mean, you vaccinate chickens just like you vaccinate your own kids.
Greg Schonefeld:
The analogy of raising a baby kind of hits for me because it's a lot different dealing with a 16-year-old than a one-year-old when it comes to people. And I guess birds are somewhat the same.
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah. I mean, nowadays with cage-free, there's a whole lot more different stuff that goes in the bullet house because the baby chick comes in the cage, and then about at five, six weeks old, you start opening the cages up and you got to train them to go out. And at night when the lights go off, you got to train them to go back in the system. That can be a five to 10 day learning curve to do that. So you let them out the first day, you come back in there with a crew at night and you probably got to pick up 50% of the birds and put them in the cage. And then the next night it's probably only 10%. And they adapt quickly. Chickens learn quickly. It's amazing to watch. And so that way when they go into the layer house and a cage-free operation where there's no doors and no fronts on the cages, that those birds know to go up in the system at night.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's interesting. And then I understand a big part of your job too has been handling all the logistics. So baby chicks to pullets to layers. And that's actually something I'd like to dive into quite a bit because we haven't on the show yet. And it just strikes me as something really complex and important. Can you give a overview of what that job entails?
Bruce Dooyema:
There's this whole scheduling mechanism of now we're doing our own pullets. We got to schedule the baby chicks to come into the building and then they're there for 16 weeks and then they go out and then you got the cleaning process and they go out to a layer house. So you got to time that all out. Anymore with these genetic companies, they want to know what your schedule is for your chick needs. I have my schedule with Hendrix and Hy-Line and H&N out till 2030.
Greg Schonefeld:
Wow.
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah. And I do all the scheduling for all of the Iowa birds and then we have Todd Boetcher that does all the other companies around the country. So in Iowa, it's a little over 20 million birds, layers. And then you got the pullets behind that. So Center Fresh, we have nine different pullet houses spread around three different counties. And same thing at Centrum. The pullet sites are not on the same side as the layer sites, and that's for biosecurity reasons, right?
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah.
Bruce Dooyema:
So if you have say all your birds in one basket where all the pullets and the layers are on the same site, if you get bird flue, everything has got to go down. Well, now you can't repopulate as fast. One of the things we did was build our pullet sites separate from the layer site. So if the layer site goes down, we can start repopulating fairly quickly.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. And part of why I ask is, okay, 20 million birds is a big picture. And then you start to think of all the different locations. I mean, that's just a lot of moving parts.
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah. So I think I added it up here recently. Between the layer houses and the pullet houses in Iowa, that's roughly 150 houses...
Greg Schonefeld:
Wow.
Bruce Dooyema:
... between pullets and layers. And we're doing about 14 to 15 million pullets a year growing. So one pullet house will safely populate four layer houses. So it's kind of like a one to four ratio. So if you get bird fluid and you got pullets on your layer operation, well, now all of a sudden I got to grow a baby chick for 16 weeks before it goes into a layer house and that only fills out one layer house out of X. It takes three times as long to fill your house because the chicken's not going to lay the eggs any quicker than 17, 18 weeks old.
Greg Schonefeld:
Versus if that's on a different site, it gives you maybe more options. I would imagine it still creates a major wrinkle though...
Bruce Dooyema:
Right.
Greg Schonefeld:
... because you already had a plan for those birds and now maybe you can have more options to change your plan, but you're still disrupted.
Bruce Dooyema:
That's what's the fun thing about it. When you think about 150 chicken houses that you got to keep track of and you get bird flu in one of the operations and now all of a sudden that messes with say 20 layer houses. Now you got to basically take your schedule and rip it up.
Greg Schonefeld:
So then you're managing it from, okay, the genetic companies, bringing in the baby chicks to the pullet, to the layer, and then to the, I guess, managing how you handle your spent hens as well. So what's the key to keeping this all together?
Bruce Dooyema:
A good spreadsheet.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Is that what you use?
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah. Everybody gives me a hard time about my spreadsheet because I have a lot of different colors on it. So it's different color for different complexes and...
Greg Schonefeld:
Are you the only one that knows how to read it?
Bruce Dooyema:
There's probably only like two, three of us that know how to read it.
Greg Schonefeld:
So when you're building that out, what's the most common thing that goes wrong or that you have to adjust?
Bruce Dooyema:
Bird flu.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's the main thing?
Bruce Dooyema:
Lately, yeah. Yeah.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. So that's obviously a very significant thing that, as you said before, you've got to rip it up and start over. Are there other factors that tend to pop up more regularly?
Bruce Dooyema:
Well, market conditions can play into it a little bit. If you've got a really bad egg market, you try to minimize the effects of a bad egg market or try to capitalize on a good egg market. So you do shift some stuff around.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. I guess I've heard that talked about pretty commonly that if egg prices are good, you might stretch a flock or any producer might stretch their flock a little and then... I mean, does any adjustment you're going to make, does it create quite a chain reaction of things?
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah, because I mean, say if you keep a flock until she's 95 or 100 weeks old, right? So if this flock goes up, say 10 weeks early, well, now all of a sudden on the backside, when that new flock comes in, that's out 10 weeks early. So now I got to move the one... The next time it gets replaced, I got to move that one up 10 weeks. So it's a chain reaction because when you make changes, it's like, "All right, I got to call this guy and go through the whole schedule." [inaudible 00:15:20] people. "All right, we got to do this." And then with the genetics companies, it's like, "We're going to change this, so that's going to change that." You get to know them on a first name basis quite regularly. So one phone call could turn into 10 in a hurry.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. You sound like a conductor or something of an orchestra.
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah. Exactly.
Greg Schonefeld:
So what are the stakes of what can go wrong when you don't get this right? I guess missing a bird date is a major thing, right?
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah. I could honestly say that of all the construction projects that we've done since 1978 and across all the operations, we've only been late on one bird date. I don't think there's a lot of egg companies that can say that.
Greg Schonefeld:
So if that does happen, what does that mean? Do you miss those birds? Do they go somewhere else?
Bruce Dooyema:
Well, you got to make a trade. That's the nice thing about, I guess being as big as Versova is that we can shift stuff around fairly easy. Let's say you're an operation of four million birds and you got 10 buildings, right? And you add 11th one and I missed the bird date. Well, those pullets are in the system that got to go into a chicken house. So if I miss that bird date, that means say one of those 10 houses has got to go empty early so that it can receive that flock of pullets because that flock of pullets have got to go somewhere. It can't stay in the pullet house because more than likely you got pullets scheduled to come in that pullet house in two weeks. So you've got to take those birds in some way, shape or form. So another house somewhere in the system has got to go empty so that you've got room for those pullets.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah, I've heard you can't put them back in the shell.
Bruce Dooyema:
Well, I always say that the bank charges interests seven days a week, so the chicken's got to lay eggs seven days a week.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. And so that's what you're trying to do is optimize that, "Hey, we're laying eggs seven days this week as much as we can."
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah. You know what's been fun though over the last 12 months to two years is these companies that have scheduling programs, how to schedule your birds and stuff, and they come and try to sell their program to you, right? And I look at it and they got it all set up, really nice for layers. And I said, "Well, I needed to go to pullets, right? You need to throw pullets in here because that's really where it starts, not on the layer. You don't do your scheduling according to layers. It really starts with a pullet house." Then they go home and try to figure that out. So I got about two or three companies that are trying to work on that part of the puzzle.
Greg Schonefeld:
As if keeping track of 20 million birds wasn't keeping him busy enough, Bruce also acts as chairman of the International Egg Foundation. And in that role, he works with producers and countries all around the world to get layer operations up and running in places where people can't always access good sources of nutrition. It's interesting and noble work, and I wanted to know what got him into it in the first place.
Switching gears to the International Egg Foundation, what drew you to the International Egg Foundation in the first place?
Bruce Dooyema:
We got invited in 2010 to go to Mozambique and look at this family operation run by the Cunninghams and they were in the broiler industry and they were thinking of getting into the layer industry and they needed some help. So we went back to Center Fresh because it was Center Fresh at the time and said, "Hey, I think this is something would we like to get involved with." And we decided, "Yeah, we want to get involved in this." So we started this egg operation and today it's around 136,000 birds. It's all independently owned by them now. I still provide expertise with them, but in Mozambique, a country of 29 million people, the per capita consumption there is like eight to 10 eggs per person per year.
Greg Schonefeld:
Oh, wow.
Bruce Dooyema:
So like the United States, we're at like 280, 285, 290 eggs per person per year. There's a lot of... Over half of the world, 50% of the population is probably eating less than 50 eggs per person per year. So we got a lot of work to do of getting egg production up going around the world. There's a lot of growth potential.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. And so I guess part of the idea here is get egg consumption up, but a big part of it is for the own health of the people in these places as well. I mean, this enhanced nutrition opportunity really can change lives in a major way.
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah. So like our Honduras operation that Versova and International Egg Foundation is involved in, they have this thousand-day program and a thousand-day program is Honduras Outreach International, HOI for short. They have been feeding eggs to pregnant moms since 2018. So when a mom comes into their clinic, they had a small egg producer that had 400 eggs, 400 chickens, and it could service 50 families where the mom and her whole family would get an egg a day because you can't just give an egg to the mom because she's not going to eat it. She's going to give it to her kids. So you want to make sure the whole family gets an egg. So while she's pregnant, and then the first three years of that kid's life, born, till the kid's three years old, so that's a thousand days. And they've kept immaculate records of this.
And Tufts University has got all the data and supposedly in June, they're going to release the findings of that, of what a difference that's made. So I've had the opportunity to interview one of the ladies in Honduras. It was a family of five, three kids, right? The first two kids were not on the program and the last child was. So what are the differences? Well, she said, "When I was pregnant with the first two, I was tired, I was lazy, I didn't do my work, I had no energy. The first two kids are born at five pounds of weight, didn't learn to walk till they're a year and a half old. Third child," she said, "I had energy. I felt normal. I could do my work. Life was good," type of thing. And she said the child was born at nine pounds of weight, almost double, and she's nine month old and beginning to walk and she attributes it to the egg.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's interesting.
Bruce Dooyema:
So we've turned that chicken producer from 400 birds to 3,000 birds now.
Greg Schonefeld:
Wow. That's wild. And what does it take to work? I mean, can you talk a little bit more to what it takes to actually put that in practice?
Bruce Dooyema:
It's taking equipment and you got manure belts, you got lighting, you got fans and stuff. Well, a lot of these Third World countries you can do without a lot of the gizmos. So the one thing is I work with Big Dutchman and we're working with other equipment companies as well. But instead of having an automatic manure belt with a motor driven, we put hand crank manure belts on there.
And then like feed carts and feed change, like everybody in the egg industry has, well, I tell them I want a feed cart that I can push by hand, that I can push down the road and I can pull it back by hand. So it puts out an even feed, right? Because like in the old days, you would take a hand scoop and you'd just load the feed trough upright. Well, now with a feed cart, I can just do it manual real quick and easy. So a lot of these bird houses are four or 5,000 bird houses, simple and easy. So the only electricity that I need in this is to run the lights. And I'm working with some Dordt University students when I go in March back to Mozambique is we're going to install solar equipment to run the lights.
Greg Schonefeld:
So these are enclosed buildings like you would see here, but smaller, I imagine?
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah, smaller. I mean, you start out with, a 2,000 bird house is a really nice size and 5,000, just like what we did in the '40s and the '50s, right? And then you work up hopefully in, probably not in my lifetime, but hopefully in 10 or 15 or 20 years or whatever, they're building a 60,000 bird chicken house or getting more commercialized that...
Greg Schonefeld:
It's an interesting perspective to me at least that if here we're talking about caged or cage-free or pasture rays there it's a whole different perspective because you're just like, "Man, how in the world do I get eggs of any type to these people?"
Bruce Dooyema:
Yeah. I mean, when you think of Third World countries, I go back to the analogy of, hey, in the 40s and 50s in the United States, in Europe, I'm sure everything's cage free, right? Birds running around on the floor, you had the roosts and stuff and you had to send your kid in there to clean the chicken house. And science told us to put birds in cages, right? Well, now we've done a 360 or 180, whatever you want to call it, where we're taking the birds and putting them back on the ground and we're fighting some of the same diseases that we fought in the earlier years when we had them on the floor.
Well, when you get to Third World countries in Africa or Central America or just Third World countries in general, I feel you got to get chickens and cages in order to have less disease pressure because you're fighting a whole host of things because yeah, biosecurity isn't as what it is in the developed world. So there's a lot of different things to fight. So I'm kind of a cage guy when it comes to Third World countries.
Greg Schonefeld:
Can you give an idea of the scale here, number of countries? I think you might've said there's like 136,000 layers now in this program.
Bruce Dooyema:
So yeah, in Mozambique there, the commercial entity there is 130,000 birds. And we've also built an Ebenezer Training Center, which is a two-year program designed for 18 to 24-year-olds where we teach them how to do crops and produce. That's the first year, and the second year we teach them how to do broilers and layers. So we built this poultry training center. And then when they graduate, we give them a stipend of X amount of dollars that they can then, when they graduate, go home into their community and start their own business of whether it's broilers or layers or they want to get into crop production or they probably want to get into all of it, right? But they got a little starting money.
So we have three Ebenezers now. We have one in Zimbabwe, that's roughly 120 students. The one in Mozambique is 50 students, and the one in Zambia is about 30 students. And now we're looking at adding another one in Malawi and a second one in Zambia.
Greg Schonefeld:
Wow, that's great. So now, I understand you're the chairman of the IEF, and if you look out at the next five to 10 years, what are you trying to accomplish? And I guess what do you need to be successful in that?
Bruce Dooyema:
Well, we need partners to come alongside of us. And we try to ask for X amount of dollars per year on a three-year commitment type thing. And if you got projects around the world that you're involved in, we'd like to know about it and see if we can come alongside and help it grow. I get calls daily, weekly, monthly of, "Hey, I got this chicken project in Timbuktu. Can you help me? What do I need to do?" So I give them advice on that. And it's amazing when you talk to these vendors of... It seems like every vendor has a person in their company that has a project in some countries around the world.
And it's fun because the egg industry to me is one big happy family. And when we go to IPP, we're all friendly. We go back home and when we talk business, we might be a little rude, but you know what? We all have a great heart and want to help people in any way, shape or form that we can. Yeah. To me, it's part of a farmer's motto.
Greg Schonefeld:
As Bruce said, there are obvious advantages to pulling resources as producers, like being able to share talent like vets and nutritionists, and being able to share ideas and expertise so that they can all make their operations more efficient. Obviously, there's also the economy of scale piece, which generally helps you to be more competitive in the marketplace. But as you consolidate, you also introduce complexity and it takes people like Bruce with their complex color coded spreadsheets to make sure all 20 million birds across the state of Iowa are accounted for. And I really respect Bruce taking the expertise he's built up over the years and taking it to countries where egg consumption is low and access to nutrition of any kind can be precarious. Now, having covered egg farming from Iowa to Zambia, just one question remains.
Well, Bruce, with that, I have just one more question for you. How do you prefer your eggs?
Bruce Dooyema:
I got to say deviled.
Greg Schonefeld:
Oh yeah, duh. I knew that. Yeah, you're like famous for your deviled egg passion.
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.