After years of having Gerber farms eggs coming from elsewhere, egg production on a greater scale has been brought back to the farm.
This spring, Micha Gerber and his wife Tina accepted delivery of a new state of the art “enriched colony” chicken housing system, as well as 1,344 Babcock hens.
After years without one, the farm now has a quota for egg-laying hens and can process everything on their farm in the Rainy River District.
“So way back my dad (Mark Gerber) had a quota production, probably 20 some years ago, then he sold his quota, so local production has actually significantly declined, he still had some but it wasn’t nearly what it was,” Gerber said.
“We took over the egg business from my dad in 2019 and we realized pretty quickly, for it to be sustainable, production has to be local and we had to ramp that back up again.”
In order to do that they needed to modernize their operation. They already had a building they could bring the housing system into, it just needed a few renovations to fit within the guidelines for a production facility.
“Many people might be familiar with what used to be called battery cages, which was where the chickens were in a very confined cage,” Gerber said.
“Those are being phased out, you can no longer build a facility like that, and for good reason.”
The new enriched colony system sees groups of 24 hens in colonies of separate compartments. This is because in larger groups chickens can get aggressive with each other and in smaller compartments they don’t have enough freedom to move around. The colonies are separated into two different areas by plastic curtains.
One area is where they can eat and drink as much as they want, as well as having perches and scratching pads. The other area is better suited to laying. According to Egg Farmers of Canada, “Even in nature, hens seek privacy away from other birds when they lay their eggs.”
The curtains in the housing unit give them the privacy they’re looking for to lay. When the eggs are laid, they fall onto a conveyor belt which brings them through the system where they’re loaded into large flats to be washed, graded, and packed in another part of the farm.
The whole housing unit is also lined by conveyor belts which catch and remove waste as well. It comes to the end of the structure and another belt carries it outside to a manure pile which can be used on the rest of the farm.
The manure then comes back around in the form of chicken feed which is in-part grown right on the Gerber farm and milled at Emo Feed from grain grown on other farms in the region.
“That’s a really neat part about it, it’s a unique area to be able to make use of local products for our local hens. It’s a really neat little ecosystem,” Gerber said.
After leaving the chicken barn, the eggs go to be washed and graded. They’re first candled to ensure there are no cracks in the shell or flaws in the egg like blood spots. Then they pass through a wash of warm water and chlorine solution, before they get graded so they can be packaged according to weight. Each egg is then placed in a carton or flat by hand packing. A day’s eggs can take time to pack but with a couple of people to work it can go faster. After sorting and packing, the eggs go in a cooler to await delivery.
“Our main priority right now is Fort Frances and the Rainy River District, that’s the area we supply,” Gerber said.
“We’re very thankful for the businesses that do support us.”
Gerber Farms eggs can be seen all across the region, they’re sold in Safeway, Cloverleaf in Emo, The Place, and J. N. Webb Wholesale, among other customers.
Before buying a quota, some of the Gerber eggs seen locally would have come via an egg grader that the farm has a relationship with in Manitoba. Now that over 1,000 eggs per day are being produced onsite, that’s not necessary anymore.
“We’ve always focused on making sure the smaller stores have the local eggs as a priority,” Gerber added.
“Now with this we’re able to branch out more to the larger retailers to make sure that the eggs they are getting are also local.”
The flock of over 1,300 will only be with the Gerbers a short time, as it’s a quota flock.
“It’s a quota flock so we’re heavily regulated,” Gerber said.
“So we’ll only have these chickens for one year then there will be a new flock, we’ll clean the barn out, sanitize everything and disinfect and there will be a new flock every year.”
The hope is to be able to sell the chickens to be able to live out their laying lives elsewhere, because while they might not be able to be used in a quota egg operation they will still have lots of eggs to give.
Gerber says after a while they hope they can expand the operation to include more hens, but it would likely require more machinery to automate some of the processes, as well as more hands in the form of employees, and, of course, another quota.
Shoppers in the Rainy River District can rest assured that when buying Gerber Farms eggs, they’re being laid close to home and packaged by local farmers.
