Might new, more energy-efficient barns be part of the response to growing demands to produce more sustainably?
Egg production accounts for approximately 3% of livestock production’s greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that its environmental impact is small. This becomes more evident when considering that these emissions are expressed in kg CO2 equivalent per kg of protein produced. Nevertheless, consumers, particularly younger generations, want concrete actions from all sectors to reduce their impact on the planet.
At the same time, consumers also want the egg sector to change some of its practices, for example switching to cage-free production, abandoning management practices that have served the sector well in reducing injury and mortality or raising slow-growing male chicks for meat production.
Abandoning these farming practices will make our sustainability journey much harder and, in fact, move us backwards where our impact on the environment is concerned.
Simply switching from cages to cage-free systems can increase emissions by approximately 18%, mainly due to higher feed consumption, higher mortality and lower productivity. We need to find new areas to shed a few kg of CO2 per ton of eggs produced.
Net zero energy
Net zero energy (NZE) buildings are energy efficient structures with net zero energy consumption. This means that the total amount of energy used by the building on an annual basis is equal to the amount of renewable energy that it can create.
By design, these buildings rely on three types of approaches: structural considerations to reduce energy use, adoption of energy efficient systems and on-site generation of renewable energy.
Government incentives, tax breaks and savings on energy costs have boosted the development of this concept for industrial sites and private homes, but the time has come to apply this concept also to our poultry barns.
Barns are typically built with timber, plywood, tin and stone wool insulation material These materials have an impact on the environment and embodied energy and represent the sum of all the energy required to produce them. The addition of extra insulation, renewable energy systems and more energy efficient equipment in a NZE barn will have a small incremental effect on the overall impact of the building itself but this will easily be offset by the reduction in direct energy use for heating and ventilation during egg production.
In a recently published study, researchers from the University of British Colombia used the Life Cycle Analysis approach to compare a NZE barn to a regular one. In the NZE layer house, the direct cumulative energy input was reduced by 36% per metric ton of eggs produced. Depending on the origin of the electricity used - fossil or hydroelectricity - the investment in a NZE barn will also provide significant benefits by reducing CO2 emissions and other impact categories.
NZE technology offers new alternatives to the egg sector along its sustainability journey and should be carefully consider next time you plan to build a new layer barn.