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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.
Mark Doyle:
We have our own hatcheries, we have our own breeder farms. Everything is here for us Americans. We have access to all of it where you're in these developing countries, that's a large capital investment, and not a lot of people can have that kind of resources available.
Greg Schonefeld:
I'm Greg Schonefeld, and this is Eggheads. Americans have a tendency to take certain things for granted, and we in the egg industry are no exception. Our well-established supply chains mean producers in the US have access to pretty much everything they need whenever they need it, and we forget that there are parts of the world where that is very much not the case.
Mark Doyle:
Hand feeders, the old hanging waterer that were in broiler houses and flat deck houses or floor operations, they still use. They have solar lights. There's no power in any of those facilities, so you got to do the best you can with what's available for you.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's Mark Doyle, the director of Vesco Structures, one of the leading providers of prefabricated steel structures for the agricultural industry, and he's been at a long time.
Mark Doyle:
Well, it started off actually in the 1970s and progressing into the eighties. I worked for a company called Aerovent Fan and Equipment, which has matured into Aerotech and now today Munters in the ventilation field.
Greg Schonefeld:
One of Mark's colleagues at Aerotech was designing large-scale ventilation systems for the international market, but he realized many of the buildings abroad weren't as well insulated as the ones they had in America, so he founded a new company to remedy that problem.
Mark Doyle:
So he went out on his own and formed a company back in the days was called VETCO, and VETCO was an international marketplace that sold poultry houses and swine houses around the world. The only market that they didn't do any work in is in the United States, actually, and the company grew from selling the first project in China in the early eighties to 85 countries where we are today.
Greg Schonefeld:
Mark's career has brought him to every corner of the globe, and today he's going to share some incredible stories from his years traveling the world and observing layer operations from Southeast Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa, and he'll also tell us about the changes he's observed both domestically and abroad during his more than three decades of industry experience.
Mark Doyle:
It was quite interesting because again, I had worked in the USA for so long and didn't have a great international exposure, and you had to learn to even describe what evaporative cooling was in a simple term because so many of the countries around the world just assumed because they were in equatorial regions, for example, that evaporative cooling wasn't a functioning idea for it. More importantly, to go along with it was the to stress the importance of having a well insulated building to run these ventilation systems.
Some of my travels around the world, I saw some tunnel ventilation systems. I'm thinking particularly of North Vietnam at this time, where they had tunnel ventilation, a real nice tunnel ventilation system, but they had slats in the building and they were breeder houses and underneath the slats they had two foot by two foot openings to clean the manure out and there wasn't a single cover on any of the openings, and they couldn't understand why the ventilation system wasn't working. Above the slats, you had a tight building, but below the slats, it was wide open. Those are the kinds of things, so you end up becoming sort of a teacher and an educator as you're trying to sell a product and promote what was happening here in America.
Greg Schonefeld:
I guess it took a sense of adventure to go do that. Was your attitude like, yeah, sign me up, let's go do it, or did you have hesitations? I mean, that's a whole different lifestyle to be traveling the globe like that.
Mark Doyle:
Oh yeah, for sure, because while I was envious of my predecessor, that I took over for, traveling to all these exotic places, when he'd come back, he says, "You don't understand. It isn't like you think it is." And I'm thinking, oh man, it's got to be so cool. But at the same time, I had a young family, I had two daughters ages four and two about when I'd ventured off into this and took a pretty strong family background to be able to leave them from a week, two weeks at a time and come back to everything, but you just try to adapt and make it work. But the biggest challenge for me was trying to understand the relationship issue with different people in different countries of the world.
Even still today, a lot of people still like to see the face-to-face, and we as Americans we use social media, Teams, and Zoom meetings, and the likes of that, where abroad, they still want to shake your hand. They still want to take a business card from your hand, and they want to see you face to face. It was difficult for me to make the transition from America to international, where a lot of the customers and potential customers they're large business people, they're not just egg producers or pig producers. Yes, they are those, but they have factories, they have shopping malls. They are integrated differently than what we are here in the USA.
Greg Schonefeld:
Over your time in the industry, which has been over 30 years, you've seen the emergence of these massive animal operations. Can you talk some about that shift in general from family farms to more of the large farming operations?
Mark Doyle:
Well, sure. I mean, anybody who researches the industry, you'll see back even in the sixties and seventies, anybody who had a 20,000-bird layer house was considered big in those days, and look at where we are today with these facilities that we're designing. I know we're talking somewhat about poultry, but a swine producer that had 200 sows in the early seventies was considered huge, and we've seen those integrations go from 2000 to, my goodness, there's 10 and 12,000 sow facilities here in America, 40-some years later. The size of these layer facilities from the old 20,000 bird flat deck facility that used to be popular to these multi-level 300,000 bird cage-free facilities.
We've gone through a pretty significant growth at the same time; look at what our production has done. When I first came into the industry, people were talking about trying to get over that 220 egg per year number, and look, we're pushing 300 today. It's just amazing-
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
Mark Doyle:
... what we've gone through. But as you said in the old days, and I'll use, I guess, the poultry show in Atlanta, what used to be called the Southeastern, there would be thousands of people there that were producers, and today I'll speak on the egg industry. I mean, there's not 30 or 40 of them that are there. Yes, a lot of people they employ, but we just don't have the numbers in terms of individual farms as what we used to have. That's for sure.
Greg Schonefeld:
So there's been a lot of consolidation.
Mark Doyle:
Absolutely.
Greg Schonefeld:
Do you see that same kind of trend overseas, maybe on a different scale, but moving in the same kind of direction?
Mark Doyle:
Well, you can look again in eggs. You can look at the PROANs of the world and the Bachokas of the world, and the CPs out of Thailand. Yeah, there's tremendous amount of integration and growth, but there still is developing that mid-sized market. We've done some one million and two million bird projects in Asia, but we've done a lot of 60,000 bird layer houses around the world, whether it'd be Central America, Southern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa or Asia. There's still a lot of smaller stuff, so the growth is there, but it's not as fast, and I don't see it coming as quickly as how we've had to do it because of legislation.
Greg Schonefeld:
I just want to hop in here to explain that when Mark is talking about legislation, he's referring to regulations that are driving the movement towards cage-free farming in the United States.
Mark Doyle:
I'm just reflecting right now. I think we've only done three or four projects outside of the Americas that were considered cage free, and it was more done on a trial basis.
Greg Schonefeld:
Oh, interesting. And would those have been outside of Europe as well?
Mark Doyle:
Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay.
Mark Doyle:
Philippines and Central America. I reflect back one of the biggest mind set that I was not prepared for as I started to travel internationally. Being an American, I was amazed that these countries I traveled to, and again, warm countries, humid countries, they don't refrigerate their eggs. They don't wash the eggs, so they're not refrigerated, and that just blew my mind initially going, "Where's your coolers at? Where's your washers at?" But they're kind of like the Europeans. They don't do it because basically it went right from the farm packer right to the store or right to the little trucks that would sell them to people. The way they market their eggs are different than the big grocery stores that we have. A lot of the producers have their own trucks that they go from little bitty, we would consider a convenience store level. They'd sell their eggs two or three dozen to these stores, or they'd sell to the restaurants right directly. So their distribution methods are different.
Greg Schonefeld:
Do you think that impacts the size of the farms, too, because-
Mark Doyle:
Oh yeah.
Greg Schonefeld:
... I mean, if you need to produce for a convenience store kind of location versus a-
Mark Doyle:
No doubt.
Greg Schonefeld:
... chain like Kroger or HEB, that changes everything about how you're going to approach things.
Mark Doyle:
There's no doubt about it that that's an influencing factor. The other part of it is finding access to day-old poulets. Not everybody has their own breeders. They don't have their own hatcheries, so well, we have our own hatcheries. We have our own breeder farms. Everything is here for us Americans. We have access to all of it. Where you're in these developing countries, that's a large capital investment, and not a lot of people can have that kind of resources available. One of my colleagues I've traveled with abroad, exported fertilized eggs all over the world. I mean, he would fly eggs to Russia to Moldova, to the Ukraine. He'd barge them over to Bahamas, he'd fly them to Central America and the Caribbean because there were no real breeders in any of those areas. It's kind of an interesting thing to see a pallet of baby chicks being unloaded off of a 777 aircraft, right?
Greg Schonefeld:
What's actually going through my mind right now is I was talking to one of my guys last week, and he's doing just... He has a brother back in Mexico, and he's just kind of experimenting right now. I guess he wants to do a little broiler operation, but I was just thinking about that when he goes to figure out how to buy feed, how does he buy feed at a reasonable price? When he's going to buy a chick, what kind of genetics is he going to buy? Someone coming in that doesn't have a history doing this, I'll be interested to hear how he keeps navigating some of these challenges.
Mark Doyle:
It's funny that he's using that model. We had a distributor in Sub-Saharan Africa that actually had us design, for broilers now, a thousand bird pen, for lack of a word, that could be compartmentalized. You could add onto it to make six weeks of production, but that thousand bird pen had to go into one crate that they could unload and put the top on top of their jeep or their vehicle. So we had to make a crate for a building, and they would drive it from the port to different locations to the people out in the middle of the country to grow their own birds and to keep the bad animals out of it. So if you can in visualize unloading a container with a thousand bird sheds, that would go all over the place.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's really interesting because it's like this people just problem-solving, but it also just casts a light on where we are in the US, where so many of these problems have been solved, or at least this supply chain has been just very much developed here, and you don't get that in a lot of countries.
Mark Doyle:
Hand feeders, the old hanging waterer that were in broiler houses and flat deck houses or floor operations, they still use. They have solar lights. There's no power in any of those facilities, so you got to do the best you can with what's available for you.
Greg Schonefeld:
One of my favorite parts of talking to Mark is that, as many travels have made him a repository of amazing stories, and once they start coming out, they just don't seem to stop.
Mark Doyle:
When you walk inside a facility, and there's a cobra on the floor. Yeah, you don't want to have too much of that happen, and that has happened, actually, here in the USA. We were doing a project in Florida a few years ago, and there was an alligator in the manure pit. We had one project in the Philippines. In fact, it was President Marcos' place. He was a customer of ours before he became president, but he had monkeys that were his security that would squeal anytime anybody came onto the farm and got near the buildings; they'd go absolutely ballistic, and they were tethered, and it was just like, "Are you kidding me? Monkeys for security?"
We were doing a Greenfield project in China for Cargill at the time back in 2012, something like that, and they were bringing us... We were all out in the middle of nowhere. It was a very primitive province in China, and they brought us our lunch for many days while we were out there getting thing organized, and it's the first time I experienced chicken noodle soup with the comb, the wattle, and the feet all in the soup at one time.
Greg Schonefeld:
And did you flinch, or you just went all in?
Mark Doyle:
I didn't eat it.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay. Yeah, I don't think I could either.
Mark Doyle:
I had bread. My colleagues did, but I wouldn't do it. Got good pictures of it, though.
Greg Schonefeld:
At the beginning, that you were talking about where you went from ventilation over to doing these buildings because you saw the discrepancy abroad and especially in some of these developing countries you've worked in, has the gap started to close?
Mark Doyle:
Oh, absolutely. Again, the magnitude of the size of these projects is not what we are doing in the US, but the quality that's going in and the workmanship that's going in is definitely coming up to par. I think of a project in Jamaica where, if I could put you on an aircraft and blind you and put you inside the facilities in Jamaica, whether standing outside or going inside, you wouldn't believe that you were in Jamaica. I could do the same thing in Botswana or Zimbabwe. It's really interesting to see how they buy into the technology. Just the scale of that isn't the same, obviously. Something as simple as sealing insulation. When I first started traveling abroad, you'd have a hard time in some countries even explaining what insulation does, and we've gone from, what does insulation do to, we're putting R30, which is very common in the US today in a lot of these facilities in the equatorial region of the world, so they're buying into the technology.
Greg Schonefeld:
I do understand Vesco has a significant presence here in America, and maybe growing that as well. What's your vision there?
Mark Doyle:
Well, as we continue to convert over to cage-free, we're hoping that we're going to be an integral part of the expansion when new structures are being entertained. We have had significant growth in our exposure to the cage-free pull it and layer market. We have already provided structures into the cage-free, organic free range in the marketplace and look to do more. I guess the big issue for Vesco is we're a steel structure, an engineered steel structure. We don't use a lot of lumber, if at all, in our structures, while we can; there's a trend to convert over to steel in some marketplaces. Insurance and risk for fires, of course, are being dictating that this be looked at more so as we see more and more pressure on trying to prevent fires, to mitigate and minimize fires, we hope that the mousetrap that we've come up with is one that people will entertain and look at as an alternative.
Greg Schonefeld:
What are some of the advantages? I think you mentioned fire resistance.
Mark Doyle:
Well, fire first and foremost. We have the ability with steel to make wider structures clear-span. We have that kind of benefit to us. Lumber does have some limitations to the overall width that you can go clear-span, where we feel that we can engineer a structure clear-span-wise with steel much better and more efficiently than with lumber. It's one. Number two, lumber is a tree. It wants to go back to its natural state if it's at all possible. I mean, if you want to bundle a whole pallet of two by fours and you just let them sit in the sun for a while or set them on a roof and not do anything with them, they'll want to warp. Steel wants to stay in its original shape, so there's some value to that.
Greg Schonefeld:
Speaking also of working in the US, I mean, one thing that's a curve ball going on right now are the tariffs. How do you approach navigating that sort of challenge?
Mark Doyle:
Every hour of every day it changes and every hour of every day we wonder what the future holds. We do import from China, our main structures at this present time; even though we engineer everything in the United States, it is indeed fabricated in China. As of the time we record this, we presently still are under a ruling from National Import Specialist Custom Border Protection that our completed structures come in tariff-free. That is not to say this afternoon or tomorrow, that will change like every other one of the tariffs that have been brought up or enforced and then subsided. So we're watching them daily, but every one of our clients in the USA that we're privileged to do business with or to secure a new order, it's in the forefront of our discussion with them.
Greg Schonefeld:
If you looked back at the last 25-ish years, what are maybe some industry trends or just situations that have been one of the bigger challenges the industry's faced or that you've faced within it?
Mark Doyle:
I would say the challenge is that these cage-free facilities bring with in respect to the ventilation design. I think that has been perhaps one of the biggest challenges is how do you ventilate three and four-floor facilities and make every bird as comfortable on the first floor as in the fourth floor or in the middle of it. I recall back in the old days when they were going from 60 foot wide layer houses to 80 foot wide, just people cringing on how we were going to get air to the center of the house because it was typically cross ventilated versus tunnel ventilated, and there was a big concern that those middle cages and cages at the time were not going to get sufficient air to make the birds happy.
I recall band-aids that we were doing in the wintertime to try to improve the minimum ventilation, and we'd purge the house every day for a certain amount of time, try to get the ammonia levels down. Now we're moving into these, again, multi-floor houses, and we're using the combination of cross ventilation, stirring, mixing the air, and then, of course, tunnel ventilation in the summertime for a lot of them. So we've made a more sophisticated ventilation system because it's becoming more complex to ventilate the house.
Greg Schonefeld:
What does it take to solve that kind of problem or to see the improvements that we've seen? Is it research? Is it technology, trial and error?
Mark Doyle:
I think it's a combination of everything, Greg. I mean, there's got to be a certain amount of research done to even determine what unit works best, number one. Number two, it takes somebody willing to want to try it, and number three, it takes a manager to be able to want to manage it and operate it to give it to its maximum potential. We see today just on the ventilation fans, these ventilation efficiency ratios, they're CFM per watt. People recognize that there is a tremendous amount of horsepower being utilized to try to get air to the birds, and you want to obviously try to get the most efficient ventilation system to minimize your overall electrical cost. So we're all trying to give a better environment with the least amount of capital investments every single month in terms of electricity and gas.
Greg Schonefeld:
So, if we look at cage-free, having been a major disruption that created change and challenges that need to be solved, do you see any trends over the next 10 to 20 years that could be a major challenge or create a big impact?
Mark Doyle:
Well, just a personal opinion. I'm going to be very interested to see what AI and robotics might have to do in the industry, but that's for some other people, a lot smarter, a lot younger than me, to figure out what to do. But we can't go a single day without hearing about AI anymore, can we? So what's that going to have to do for our industry? Are we going to monitor the birds differently than what we presently do? What are robots going to do inside the house? What's going to happen, I think, is where the future is from my perspective, but I'm going to be long gone by then. It's your turn to take over for something like that, Greg.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's a really interesting thought, and I will probably gladly be watching what takes place there. I'm interested to hear you I guess just reflect with all your time and experience in the industry, is there something that stands out that makes you most proud?
Mark Doyle:
Yeah. It's still agriculture, and America and the world are driven by agriculture. Despite the fact that there may not be as many of us today, we still produce the most protein. We still are in everyone's home every single day, whether it be a mansion or a hut. Without us, what would the future be if you don't have affordable food? I've never seen so many people talk about eggs before in my career, just as the example you talk about. I've never seen so many people argue about a brown egg being better tasting than a white egg over my career.
It's just amazing that they're bringing something as simple as an egg that we take for granted back into their discussions because of what we've gone through recently with the price points on it. I think I find it interesting as I reflect over the career, as we've changed our thoughts about animal welfare and animal rights. Never ever thought that that was going to be such a major topic when I got involved in this industry so many years ago, but it is in the forefront today. I mean, what is being done in America or Europe with animal welfare and animal rights has a real big impact on what we're doing as producers.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Do you have thoughts on that? I mean, has that topic made the industry better, or what are your thoughts on how the industry's responded to that?
Mark Doyle:
Well, I think the industry's responded, in my opinion, pretty remarkably, making these capital investments that are, again, egg producers are going through. I mean, it is to everyone that's in the industry's knowledge, just a major expense to convert over from cage to cage free, and are you getting the return at your market for what you've invested? So I think they've reacted very favorably towards it as an industry and whole. But again, it's just something amazing to see how this welfare issue has become a very important part of a decision today of whether you're going to be in the industry or not, and comply with the welfare rules.
Greg Schonefeld:
I am just curious, for someone maybe in the US, interested in working in agriculture globally, what would you say to somebody who has that interest?
Mark Doyle:
Well, from personal experience, it's been a great experience. Obviously, make sure that if you're going to be involved with another corporation, make sure that they have all the tools necessary for global travel. I mean, it's more than just getting on an aircraft. There's a lot of countries that you've got to have shots for that we don't have to have in the USA, little minor things like that. Emergency transportation, there are countries that you just don't want to have medical work done to you. You got to get out, and there's facilities in place where if you get sick and I'm picking on Zimbabwe, but you just want to get out of there. They have some medical procedures done. There's ways to get you out. Unfortunately, there's risk involved in some countries, so there's risk in kidnap insurance that you got to be thinking about, and you got to be able to adapt.
One particular country in mind, the first time I traveled extensively there, well, my first travel there, and I've subsequently traveled extensively. When I got off the aircraft in the airport, the prospective customer's driver met me and the gentleman I was traveling with and gave us a flak vest and asked us if we knew how to shoot a rifle, and you just don't think, what are you talking about? Shoot a rifle. Well, got inside of their armor-plated it was a Lexus, and there was a hand pistol in the front and an M-16 in the back. His shopping malls had been bombed recently by the terrorists. That's why we wore a flak vest and had weapons inside the car to go to their office, that was in the mall. Subsequently, they settled with the terrorists, and we didn't have to wear the flak vest any further in follow-up trips, but it was a cultural shock that you go through.
So you got to be able to adapt if at all possible. If you're going to get in the international world, you got to be able to eat some things and drink some things that you just wouldn't normally do. Don't drink alcohol that second time after you've done it the first time. So those are some things that you got to be able to adapt for, and they don't put those in books in school. Those are the kind of things that don't get talked about the relationship and the culture that you've got to adapt to.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Well, Mark, I think you've proven that agriculture can lead to way more adventure than I think most people imagine.
Mark Doyle:
Yep. It's a good thing to be involved, in my opinion.
Greg Schonefeld:
So there you have it, Mark Doyle, an industry veteran with one of the most storied careers of anyone I've ever met in the ag business, and it just goes to show that there's so many different paths a person can take in this industry, some of which can take you to places you never would've imagined, and having heard as many travel stories and his reflections on how he's seen the industry change over the years, all that remained was for Mark to answer the toughest question of all: how do you prefer your eggs?
Mark Doyle:
How do I prefer my eggs? Sunny side up.
Greg Schonefeld:
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.