What’s a hatchery all about?

Chicken consumption is a big deal down under. Each year, Australians eat 1.2 billion tonnes of chicken meat, which comes from 660 million animals. You’re probably familiar with farms and processing plants at either end of the chain – but to keep things ticking over safely and humanely on such a huge scale, producers rely on lesser-known facilities called hatcheries.

Many people don’t understand what a hatchery involves. It’s not a big shed housing a bunch of chickens sitting on eggs day and night. It’s actually a high-tech facility, with state-of-the-art incubators, hatchers and automation equipment turning eggs into healthy chicks.

Most of the hatcheries designed and constructed by BADGE (such as this one in Allora, Queensland) can produce up to 800,000 day-old chicks per week. The largest, in Monarto, South Australia, will have the capacity to produce 2.4 million day-old chicks per week when fully fitted-out.

So how does it all work? First of all, fertile eggs are delivered to the hatchery from breeder farms.

The freshly-delivered eggs are kept cool before they’re put into big incubators – known in the industry as ‘setters’ – via trays on trolleys. Each setter can take 126,000 eggs, and the trolleys get hooked up to motors that tip the trays from side to side. This simulates an egg being sat on by a chicken, which in theory produces a healthier chick.

The setters have all sorts of fans and sensors that monitor and control the air flow, temperature and humidity for about 17 days. After that, the trolleys of eggs are wheeled out and into the automated transfer system.

After being transferred into baskets and stacked on yet more trolleys, the eggs get wheeled into hatchers, where the chicks progressively hatch out over three days. From there the chicks get tipped out and conveyed into a different basket with a quick health check along the way. They are then ready for delivery to a broiler farm.

Automation has completely changed the game in terms of efficiency. An advanced hatchery processing a million chicks per week only needs 20 staff, and even then they’re mostly concerned with moving the trolleys around and overseeing the operation. Today’s machines can even pick out biohazardous bad eggs and quarantine them before they enter the hatcher baskets, which is impossible with human eyes. The gadgetry keeps evolving too – my next blog will include what I learned on my recent visit to the Netherlands, which is a global leader in the development of hatchery technology.

As you might imagine, there are plenty of challenges involved when it comes to building one of these hatcheries. For example, they are biosecure facilities with a high level of hygiene, so the materials need to handle a daily hit of detergent and sanitiser. Detailing floors and drains is also critical given the rigours of the production process – those trolleys that get wheeled around weigh over 500kg. Of course the fit-out of such high-tech equipment calls for some very detailed planning as well.

Are you weighing up a new hatchery or another food processing facility? We have plenty of expertise to share in the design and construction of these state-of-the-art facilities, so feel free to get in touch with us for a chat about your project.