Select Genetics’ Indiana hatchery built to grow

Select Genetics' new Indiana hatchery takes advantage of the opportunity to install the latest available technology to supply high quality turkey poults.

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Michael Iseman, hatchery manager for Select Genetics, inspects a pullet. | Photo by Austin Alonzo
Michael Iseman, hatchery manager for Select Genetics, inspects a pullet. | Photo by Austin Alonzo

The world’s largest turkey hatchery is part of Select Genetics’ wave of investment to improve and modernize their supply of poults for the U.S. and international market.

The $30 million, 118,000-square-foot hatchery located in Terre Haute, Indiana, hatched its first eggs in September 2018. The facility hatches eggs supplied by breeder farms in Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, North Carolina, Virginia and Ontario, Canada. The hatchery is equipped to set 41.6 million eggs per year, or about 800,000 per week, and its capacity can be expanded to as many as 62.4 million per year.

Jihad Douglas, CEO of Select Genetics, said the hatchery is using state-of-the-art hatching and transportation technology to supply poults to turkey farms located in Indiana, Ohio and other locations in the Midwest as well as farms in Canada and other countries around the world.

Investing in new infrastructure

In an interview, Douglas explained Select Genetics, part of the primary breeder Aviagen Turkeys, decided to build the Terre Haute hatchery as part of a campaign to replace aging infrastructure elsewhere in the Midwest. In a broader sense, few new hatcheries and breeder farms were built within the last 20 to 30 years. Douglas said the new investments were necessary because Aviagen is ultimately responsible for the quality of the product that reaches the consumer.

The new infrastructure should provide superior biosecurity and food safety as well as a higher quality poult. Along with the new hatchery, he said Aviagen is planning to invest in new breeder farms in Minnesota and Missouri and improve its breeder operation in Illinois.

Looking toward the future

The hatchery takes advantage of the opportunity to install the latest and best available technology to create a system that will both stand the test of time and meet the challenges of modern animal agriculture.

The hatchery is designed for expansion. Doug High, director of hatcheries for Select Genetics, said rather than construct a building which may need to be expanded in the future it was wiser to build one that’s easily expanded if necessary. Around the building, corridors and rooms are built large enough and engineered for easy expansion of operations when the need arises.

The complex was built to establish the most biosecure environment possible. The flow of the structure separates dirty areas from clean ones and, High said, prevents workers from backtracking through clean areas. Workers are supplied with a full outfit of clothing to minimize possible outside contamination. Workers use a locker room, equipped with showers for wash-in, wash-out procedures when necessary, to change from street clothes to hatchery clothes before work.

Along with these practices, the complex features a full truck wash depot. High said any vehicle entering the hatchery must be washed and sanitized to prevent the introduction of pathogens into the facility. Rather than just spraying the vehicles down, the full interiors and exteriors are sanitized in the depot.

Single-stage incubation

Incubation takes place in Jamesway Incubator Co. P40 incubators which hold 24,960 eggs each and use a single-stage incubation process. Although single-stage incubation is not a new concept, the modern machines allow for more precise incubation and better hygiene than ever before.

Single-stage machines incubate eggs of the same age for the entire process, rather than keeping eggs of multiple different ages in the same chamber. This allows for full cleaning of the devices between batches of eggs and more control over the environmental conditions – like temperature, humidity and air flow – inside the incubator.

Dr. Michelle Behl, director of poult quality, said this allows the fine tuning of the environment so the embryos can express their best genetic potential for factors like breast meat yield or total body weight. The result is healthier poults delivering superior performance in the field.

High-tech transportation

As part of its investment in a modernized supply chain, Select Genetics standardized its fleet of tractors and trailers to haul poults to farms around the country. Douglas said the company invested heavily in this area to make sure the poults are in a state-of-the-art shipping environment.

High and Michael Iseman, hatchery manager for Select Genetics, said the trucks are outfitted with sensors to track both the driver’s performance and the mechanical aspects of the truck. Select Genetics employees located both at the hatchery and the company’s central transportation office in Willmar, Minnesota, monitor the onboard sensors at all hours to prevent any problems and ensure the poults are delivered to their destination within 24 hours of hatching.

The poults are moved in Smithway Inc. trailers specially outfitted for the task. High and Iseman said the trailers are fully environmentally controlled. The trailers feature onboard generators – including a back-up unit should the first one fail – and high-capacity air conditioning units to provide an ideal temperature and keep carbon dioxide levels in check during transportation.

Hands-on work

While automation marches forward around the world, Select Genetics decided sticking with human hands for precise work is necessary for delivering a high quality product.

“There’s a lot of innovations available, however if you have automations then you can have quality issues,” High said. “We use high-tech machines to incubate our product to get a good quality product and we use human beings to make sure that they get out of the hatchery in the best shape possible.”

 

 

Read more:

Investing in poultry health, www.wattagnet.com/articles/35151

 

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