Day 6 - Eggs!!!

As a chicken farmer and an Eggs-pert, I was very Egg-xcited about our trip to the Egg washing and grading facility today in Japan! The tour did not disappoint! The Japanese eat eggs raw quite often so they put a large emphasis on quality and freshness. And they eat a lot of eggs: 320 eggs per person per year. In no more than three days, eggs are laid, washed, graded, packaged, and delivered to the consumer. In the US that process can take up to 30 days but we don't eat raw eggs so no worries. The shelf life of an egg that will be cooked can be up to 4 months if properly stored. The shelf life of an egg to be eaten raw is only 14 days and that is how their cartons are date stamped. 

This washing and grading facility gets their eggs from 6 local farms who own the facility as a cooperative. The facility cleans and packages 80,000 eggs per hour or 600,000 eggs per day. The hens lay eggs for this facility for two years. After that they either go for lower quality meat (chicken nuggets) or to another farm where they continue to lay eggs. These hens are less productive and lay larger eggs that are less desirable for consumers.

The whole washing and grading process is fully automated and done by robots. There are a few check point where workers pull out broken eggs but the majority of the quality check is done by machine. During one step, a machine hits the egg shell in kind of a drumming method to check for hairline cracks; eggs that have small cracks sound different when drummed than those that do not. Another check spot candles the eggs to look for abnormal yolk color or small blood spots inside the egg. If one has an abnormality it is automatically rejected. About 10% of the eggs that go through are rejected and used for either liquid eggs or fertilizer depending on the severity of the reject. The eggs are weight and separated by weight for packaging. From the time the eggs are washed to when they are fully packages takes only 3 to 5 minutes. 

Marc Bremer Son blew our hosts' minds with this fun fact: if you feed laying hens white corn they lay eggs with clear yolks. I have now sourced some white corn from Steve Huls Son to creat premium, value added eggs on our farm! I'm about to bust into the Japanese egg market! Think I can keep up with demand with our 8 ladies?