[C]ommodity egg production has increased in the U.S., and a cage-free version of that trend is happening in Vermont, too.
“It’s one of the brighter spots in the farm economy right now,” said Sam Smith, a farm business specialist at the Intervale Center in Burlington. Smith, who helps farms with business planning, said he has seen an increase in small-scale egg producers — those who keep under 3,000 birds.
“It seems to be a relatively nice business model for the farms that are doing it in that 1,000 bird-to-3,000 bird level,” Smith said. “There’s definitely been an increase in competition in that market.”
The National Agricultural Statistics Service reports that Vermont egg production increased 1.4 percent in 2018 over the year before. That’s an increase of 4.2 percent from 2016, and includes the commodity eggs that make up the majority of the eggs sold. There are some commodity egg producers in Vermont, and then some small-scale operations catering to people who want local, farm-raised eggs from chickens who aren’t living in cages. Buyers have shown that’s what they want, said Ben Butterfield, whose Besteyfield Farm in Hinesburg produces eggs from 3,000 chickens.
“Egg sales in general have been up, and specifically local egg sales have been up, at least at the stores I sell at,” said Butterfield, a vegetable farmer who started out with 400 birds seven years ago.
“Demand has been really strong, which is really helpful and is why I expanded to 3,000,” he said. “It’s attributable to everyone eating more eggs, and around here people want those eggs to be as local as they can, and from a type of operation they are comfortable with.”
Eggs themselves, wherever they come from, have experienced a reversal in fortune in recent years. Once identified as the cause of high cholesterol, eggs are now seen as an affordable and healthy source of high-quality protein. The Harvard School of Public Health shows cautious approval for eggs, noting that the once maligned products contain nutrients that may lower the risk for heart disease. The website “Eat this, not that!” included eggs on its Top 100 Healthiest Foods list last year.
Eggs are also a relatively affordable protein source, and the price doesn’t rise markedly even when the eggs are marketed as cage-free. Part of the reason is that production doesn’t change dramatically in a pasture-based system, Smith said.
“They can hit lay rates that are not that far off conventional confinement-style farms,” he said. Distribution costs are also similar, he said.
“They don’t have invest heavily in processing equipment and processing efficiency,” he said.
Raising more than 3,000 chickens triggers regulation by the USDA. Farms under that size are regulated by the state. There are also structural reasons, apart from regulation, for staying at 3,000 birds, said Hugo Gervais, who produces eggs from about 3,000 chickens at his Savage Gardens farm in North Hero. His farm produces about 1,000 dozen a week, and more in the summer. For example, he said, there are only so many eggs one farmer can deliver before having to hire help.
“There’s kind of like a sweet spot where you can do most of the work yourself, and that keeps the costs down, and then once you get higher your income isn’t quite high enough for you to support paying more people to do more things to make it feasible,” he said.
It’s clear many consumers care about where their eggs come from.
“It’s always been challenging to make sure we have a full set of local eggs,” said Alison Hope, spokesperson for City Market, Onion River Co-op in Burlington. “We work really hard to make sure we work with a variety of different farmers, to make sure we have an egg set that represents a diversity of local eggs.”
The largest egg distributor in the Vermont area is Pete and Gerry’s in Monroe, New Hampshire, which buys free-range eggs from two Vermont farms and is looking for more. Those Vermont farms have 12,000 and 20,000 chickens, said CEO Jesse Laflamme. The company works with 130 farms in 12 states and has grown 20 to 25 percent annually over the last several years, Laflamme said.
“We sell a lot of eggs in New England, and as that market grows, we want to have more family farms in New England,” said Laflamme. “The challenge has been really finding farmers who can either get financing or are interested in the first place.”
The conventional and even the organic egg industry is highly consolidated. Laflamme, whose company sells about 70 million dozen eggs per year, noted that Giroux Poultry Farm across Lake Champlain in Chazy, New York, has about 2.5 million hens. Most of the eggs sold in Vermont come from Giroux and a farm in Pennsylvania, he said.
“Basically unless you have half a million or really well over a million hens now, you’re just not competitive in conventional egg selling,” he said. That said, he noted one of the two Vermont farms, in Waterford, is a former dairy operation. The other supplier is in Wolcott.
“Dairy farmers make incredible egg farmers, largely because they have spent their lives looking at the animals as individuals and not as this mass,” he said.
Vermont’s farm economy is ripe for diversification after four years of very low milk prices.
“We have a very dynamic picture in our agriculture economy right now,” Smith said. “We are losing a really significant number of (dairy) farms, so we are going to see a lot of that land turn over in the next few years, and diversified production models, like egg layers, are the potential areas of expansion.”
Other bright spots in the Vermont farm economy are vegetable farms and meat producers who are growing animals for direct markets or regional wholesale, Smith said.
“And then we obviously have CBD,” Smith said. “We’ll see how that wild ride goes.”
