How Hens Are Housed, Continued

Continual progress

As egg farming evolves as an industry, farmers are always interested in discovering, testing out, and implementing new practices. The goal shared by all egg farmers is to continuously improve the way they farm for the good of their flocks, the environment, and the people who rely on eggs as part of their healthy diets.

Necessary, but not easy

These days, egg farming is mostly specialized, with larger egg farms receiving their laying hens from separate hatcheries that are devoted to producing chicks.

What many people don’t realize is that there are different types of chickens: some that have been carefully bred to lay more high-quality eggs, and others—called “broilers”—that have been bred and are raised for the quality and quantity of their meat.

Broiler chickens can be either male or female, but since only female chickens can lay eggs, in the egg industry, there isn’t a need for males. One of the difficult realities of modern egg farming is that there’s no way for egg farms to afford to raise and maintain the male chicks the hatcheries produce, and so they are culled shortly after they’re hatched.

Egg farmers continue to support research into solutions to this difficult fact of egg farming. For example, there’s been a lot of progress made by researchers exploring methods and technology to help identify a chick’s sex long before it is hatched.

In fact, in early 2025, a few U.S. hatcheries will deploy in-ovo sexing technologies and produce the first eggs that are sexed before hatch. While this technology is not yet commercially scalable, it holds promise, and the egg industry continues to invest in innovations to solve for this challenge.

Spent hens

Young chickens don’t lay eggs for about four months, and hens don’t produce eggs forever. Just as with male chickens, egg farms can’t afford to feed and care for non-productive hens and still stay in business. So, when hens can no longer produce eggs, they are humanely euthanized. The meat from the “spent hens” serves a useful purpose, most often as an ingredient in pet food or in farm fertilizer.