Joice and Hill is helping to advance Britain’s egg-laying sector through a combination of investment and innovative thinking. By Michael Barker
Britain’s egg sector is only as good as the quality of its layers, so it is reassuring to get an insight into the depth of work that is helping to take the industry to the next level.
At the forefront of that work is Joice and Hill, which won the Hatchery of the Year category at the 2023 National Egg & Poultry Awards in recognition of its sizeable investment in both its hatchery facilities and research and development, carried out in the UK and globally by its parent company Hendrix Genetics.
Peterborough-based Joice and Hill distributes the Hendrix Genetics range of egg-layer breeds in the UK and Ireland, currently supplying around 37% of market demand. The business sells a range of brown egg layers – including world-leading breed Bovans Brown – alongside the highly productive white egg layer the Dekalb White and a series of speciality hens. In addition to the hatchery, the business also manages the parent stock farms that provide the hatching eggs, which is a key part of the operation that gives the company vital control over its own supply chain.
Managing Director Nick Bailey has been with the business since 1996, and in charge since 2008, and he says the overall combination of traits offered by the Hendrix birds, from production numbers to ease of management, robustness, and recovery from disease, give them their unique selling point. That’s down to the amount of investment that goes into genetic selection, breeding technology and field-based testing, he adds.
Beyond that, there’s one clear factor that is increasingly winning customer loyalty and market share for Joice and Hill – extended laying cycles. “Since the beginning of modern poultry breeding, geneticists have focused on hens which lay at a higher rate up to 60-70 weeks of age,” Bailey explains. “Having already extended to 80 weeks, Hendrix Genetics took the view that even testing and selecting to 80 weeks was no longer going to be sufficient, particularly with the US talking about banning forced moulting. We thought that the only reasonable way we could improve the birds more was to extend that testing range up to 100 weeks. And that’s what we’ve ended up with now – birds that can lay reliably on a good feed conversion, with excellent shell quality, all the way to 100 weeks.”
Achieving that 100-week milestone might have seemed unrealistic a decade or two ago. Pedigree, pure line birds, such as those maintained by Hendrix Genetics in France and the Netherlands and backed up by flocks around the world, are selected to make the next generations and real progress is being made. “At the moment we are adding approximately one week of production every year from these efforts,” Bailey explains, “and the geneticists that I talk to think that within their lifetime, flocks going on one cycle to 120 weeks of age is a realistic proposition. When I first started in the industry, people were depleting at 65 to 70 weeks, so that’s a that’s an unbelievable gain.”
It is the white birds that are showing the most promise, and while 100 weeks has been achieved with brown flocks, 85-90 weeks is still more common. That inevitably leads to the question of whether the market should continue to be steered more towards white eggs, and Bailey believes the supermarkets are already “pretty sold on the white egg story”, pointing to the fact that Lidl in the Netherlands has already switched to 100% white and British retailers are starting to get on board. He believes that the UK market will ultimately see a mixture of brown and white, but with white having a growing significance over time.
There are multiple benefits to longer bird cycles, according to Bailey – not least from the sustainability angle. “If you take a flock to 100 weeks rather than, say, 75, which has been the normal brown production length, that means in a five-year period you only have to buy or rear three lots of pullets rather than four. And that’s a huge impact on the carbon footprint of the chain, and also a massive saving to the clients who have to turn around the units one less time in five years and buy one flock less.”
Sustainability is certainly something that Hendrix Genetics as a group is putting a great deal of thought into. The company is a member of Code-EFABAR – a voluntary code of practice in support of responsible breeding – and invests time and resource into looking at ethical breeding practices and the conservation of genetic resources. “It’s about breeding birds that are healthy and full of vigour at the end of production,” Bailey notes.
The company’s other key sustainability stream focuses on its footprint on the world, and to that end a monitoring process is in place whereby all of Hendrix’s global operations report on feed and energy consumption, as well as any antibiotic use, which is something Bailey stresses is kept to an absolute minimum.
Investment in sustainability is just one of the core focuses of attention for Hendrix Genetics, which prides itself on innovation and continuous development. One current project is HenTrack, which examines individual bird movement and location patterns to bring genetic selection of cage-free laying hens to the next level. The current phase of the project sees $2.7m of funding used to promote cage-free housing for laying hens and improve their health and welfare through new breeding approaches. The idea is that by remotely monitoring hen behavioural patterns, assessment of relevant traits can be carried out without disturbing the birds, with data able to be collected from individual hens in large groups in a way not possible before.
There are also projects underway focused on liveability, with the company keen to improve outcomes in areas such as keel bone strength, while a further area of focus centres on in-ovo sexing. Hendrix is currently trialling two different types of technology in two of its hatcheries, in response to law changes in Germany and France banning the culling of male chicks at birth. Bailey says that “if you look at the detail, then it [the technology] is not quite there yet” but expects progress to be made going forward and for a move ultimately towards in-ovo sexing as early in the process as possible.
All of that is at a group level, but back in the UK there have been investments aplenty in recent years too. The hatchery has been completely renovated over the past decade, with all the old incubation equipment replaced and updated. New, single-stage Jamesway incubators and hatchers were installed that are much more energy efficient than the old equipment and provide much better hatchability results and better chick quality. There are also substantial improvements when it comes to heat recovery, with that now used both to preheat the air that goes into the processing areas, as well as preheat the fresh eggs that go into the incubators themselves. That has resulted in a 50% improvement in the hatchery’s capacity using the same amount of electricity and a third of the gas than before the upgrade, with further savings coming from solar panels on the hatchery roof that generates a quarter of the site’s electricity needs. A ground source heat pump helps cool the eggs.
The company is not immune to the same challenges its customers face when it comes to grappling with input cost increases, but one of the biggest areas of concern is around labour. With 94 employees and two substantial increases in the National Minimum Wage in the past two years, it’s been a lot of extra cost to swallow. Brexit has only complicated life further, with poultry businesses having to look further afield for staff. “The reason why there’s immigration of people into this country is because there’s a shortage of people to do these kinds of jobs, whether it’s health or care homes or slaughterhouses or farming,” Bailey says. “We’re competing for that labour and it’s a shrinking pot. It’s very, very tough.”
Bailey says Joice and Hill is “a very good employer” that takes care of its staff, trains them and encourages them to take responsibility. It also offers apprenticeship schemes to bring the next generation in, but it can still be difficult to attract people to certain jobs and locations, and replacing older and retiring employees is a constant challenge despite a relatively low staff turnover.
Those employees deserved last summer’s award win, Bailey maintains. “It was incredibly gratifying to win and a great one for the team of people who do all the day-to-day hard work,” he says. “I know that’s a big boost to them, seeing the award come in. It’s a real slap on the back and well done to them.”
The path to Hendrix
Joice and Hill’s history has been one of a succession of different ownerships before finally ending up in the Hendrix Genetics stable where it sits today. The company started life in 1965, when the eponymous founders came together to breed their own chickens. Initially hatching and distributing Babcock variety layers, the business was transferred to Dutch breeder Euribrid in the 1970s, before being sold to former Hillsdown CEO Robert Haynes in 1993. In 1998, Euribrid merged with Hendrix, which itself acquired ISA in 2005 to become the largest layer breeder in the world. In 2006, Joice and Hill acquired the former ISA UK hatchery and farms, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Hendrix Genetics in 2010.