Part of working in agriculture means being adaptable. And part of being a land-grant university means being prepared to help farmers and producers when they need to adapt.
Leaders at Michigan State University did just that over 10 years ago when building a new aviary facility in response to legislation passed by the state of Michigan that modified the requirements necessary for housing laying hens and other farm animals.
At the time of its completion in 2012, the public research facility was the first of its kind in the U.S. No other land-grant university had infrastructure like it to conduct research that would give egg producers the information needed to respond to shifting regulations.
It became a regional hub for states such as Michigan, Ohio and Indiana where researchers, egg producers and professionals from allied industries could work together to answer questions regarding animal welfare, egg production and overall logistics of aviary systems.
Since then, new facilities have popped up across the country, but the updates made over the years to the one at MSU’s Poultry Teaching and Research Center have positioned Michigan’s land-grant university as a continued leader in this field and trusted source of information for producers and other stakeholders. It’s also helped Michigan maintain its status as a top egg-producing state, ranking seventh in the country with over 5 billion eggs produced annually, according to Michigan Allied Poultry Industries.
“If you think about the fact that our egg layers produce all the eggs we need in Michigan and then beyond, that’s a big food source,” said Nancy Barr, executive director of MAPI. “For food security, food safety, animal welfare, sustainability and all these issues we deal with in an incredibly critical area like food production, we need MSU. We want to continue the strong collaboration, and we want to make sure there’s financial support so that the university can prioritize the land-grant part of Michigan State University.”
The facility’s undertaking wouldn’t have been possible without the Michigan Alliance for Animal Agriculture, a partnership among MSU, Michigan’s animal ag industries and the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.
The response
In 2009, the Michigan Legislature passed Public Act 117, which made changes to how certain farm animals, such as laying hens, were to be kept on farms. The act required that hens and other animals be confined in a way that didn’t limit their movement, and it placed a ban on conventional cage systems — which restricted movement — following 10 years of the bill’s passage.
Janice Swanson knew this was coming. She also knew MSU needed to have the capacity to answer the questions producers were going to have.
As chair of the MSU Department of Animal Science from 2010-17, she helped bring leaders within the university, allied poultry industries and state of Michigan together to form a plan.
“I think we all knew this would be coming, even the egg producers themselves, but there was nobody in the U.S. that had a facility where this research could be done,” Swanson said. “There may have been a few private egg producers or companies that had experimental facilities, but there was nothing in the public venue. So, we started talking about this need for a facility because of the social and legal issues coming to bear as well as the understanding that these egg producers were stuck.”
Greg Herbruck agreed that there needed to be a place for research to occur. Herbruck is the CEO of Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch — the largest egg producer in Michigan and 10th largest in the U.S., producing over 2.5 billion eggs annually.
His family’s company has long been a leader in promoting the welfare of laying hens, but as regulations changed, he said research was needed to help them move forward.
“We all grew up with cages, and our parents grew up with cages, but now consumers and the state law were saying we had to do it differently,” Herbruck said. “That was the foundational piece for why a lot of us producers put money forward to help get that facility built, so we could have that kind of asset in our backyard that’s dealing with our conditions and is somewhere we can stay connected and be a part of the review and preparation for research projects.”
With the support of producers and the Animal Agriculture Initiative at MSU (which has since evolved to become M-AAA), the laying hen research facility was built in 2012.
The new facility provided the proper space for research to be done using commercial aviaries and enriched-cage systems. The enriched cages were considered by many at the time to be the future of laying hen housing systems. Unlike conventional cages, these are larger colony cages that allow for more movement and offer furnishings such as nest boxes, perches and scratching areas.
The aviary system is cage-free and includes furnishings like those in enriched cages, while also allowing hens open access to a litter floor and freedom to move among stacked tiers. Both systems are indoor housing options.
In 2019, though, the Michigan Legislature passed Public Act 132 requiring that eggs produced in Michigan facilities with more than 3,000 hens must come from cage-free housing systems by the start of 2025.
MSU leaders were once again able to quickly respond to meet the needs of producers. Facilitated by MSU AgBioResearch and MSU Extension, M-AAA backed the installation of several new cage-free systems in 2019 from Big Dutchman, a leading global provider of equipment for modern egg, poultry and pig production.
Today, the MSU laying hen research facility accommodates rooms with cage-free systems, enriched-cage systems and systems that can be described as a combination of both — all giving students and researchers opportunities to study the behavior, welfare and egg production of hens housed across multiple settings.
“The good story out of this is that we all had skin in the game,” Swanson said. “M-AAA, which is a public-private partnership among stakeholders, MSU and MDARD — an agency that I also want to mention played a critical role in these efforts — helped us meet an industry need not only within the state but the region too.”
The research and results
As housing requirements for laying hens continued to be modified across U.S. states after legislation first passed in California and then Michigan in 2008 and 2009, research needed to be done to understand how these changes would affect hens.
Prior to these changes, many hens in the U.S. were bred for the conditions of conventional housing systems and weren’t accustomed to cage-free or enriched-cage systems, Swanson said. Because of this reality, questions arose on how, when and where hens would lay their eggs as well as how they’d behave in these new systems and how these systems would remain sanitary.
Along with Swanson, Janice Siegford and Darrin Karcher have worked to help answer these questions. Siegford is a professor and associate chair for graduate programs and research in the MSU Department of Animal Science, and Karcher is a current associate professor of animal sciences at Purdue University and a former MSU Extension poultry specialist during the time when MSU’s laying hen research facility was established.
Swanson said the strong relationships Karcher built with Michigan egg producers through MSU Extension were foundational to the facility’s development, helping define its vision and secure the funding needed to bring it to life.
Once opened, the facility quickly became an important research platform for Siegford, who’s been using it since to study how hens use space in alternative housing systems. She said regardless of their genetic strains, hens have natural tendencies such as wanting to lay eggs in dark, enclosed, private spaces. What a human might consider to be a proper nest, however, might not be what a hen considers.
“If you design a cage-free system based on what works for you as a human, what works for the airflow as an engineer, or what works for keeping the eggs clean as a producer, the chicken might be like, ‘That doesn’t satisfy my definition of a nest,’” Siegford said. “She might look at that and go, ‘I’m going to lay my egg on the floor in the litter.’ And they do.”
Through her research, Siegford has learned how different strains of hens interact with each other when they want to lay eggs. Some strains will space out their laying throughout the day so that they can lay eggs in nesting boxes when available, while others are particular on when they lay eggs and will do so wherever to meet their preferred time.
From these findings, Siegford is studying the ways producers can promote egg laying in nesting boxes — whether by adding light close to the floor to discourage hens from laying eggs in the litter, adding flaps to nesting boxes to make those areas darker and more private, or increasing the accessibility of nesting boxes with where they’re located in the cage-free system.
Understanding how hens interact with their environment has been critical, Herbruck said. When cage-free systems were implemented into his farm’s operations, he said mortality rates among hens rose. With research from MSU, though, his team reversed the trend.
“When we first started, mortality rates were significantly higher in cage-free systems versus caged systems,” Herbruck said. “Some of it was for mechanical reasons — a hen would fall and break a bone. Another part of it was that the cage-free system is somewhat of a dirtier environment because hens can scratch around in the litter, and that litter has waste in it. So, there were some challenges, but with the learnings that many of us received, we’ve gotten our mortality rates back to very close to what we were experiencing with cages.”
Another area of research that’s helped Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch is understanding how to keep litter dry in cage-free systems. Not only has this been necessary to promote a clean and safe space for hens, but it’s also helped the ranch repurpose litter into a natural plant fertilizer that can complement egg sales, Herbruck said.
Karcher said this research, supported by MSU AgBioResearch and dispersed by MSU Extension, is an example of how the facility contributed to informing producers on effective management strategies when prior information was limited.
“We weren’t only looking at the litter itself and production outcomes, but we were also factoring in the microbiology, the food safety and a bigger perspective of some of those things that we know impact daily production,” Karcher said. “How the industry has used some of that then is to better inform what producers do from a day-to-day basis.”
Karcher echoed that at the time of its opening, the MSU facility was the first of its kind. Over time, other universities such as Purdue University have modified or built similar facilities. Because of a close collaboration between Purdue and MSU, Karcher said each of the two facilities have been equipped with features unique to them, which has fostered greater research capacity in the Great Lakes region that producers can benefit from.
In reflecting on his time at MSU, Karcher said he appreciated M-AAA because it’s served as a channel to connect and hear from producers and allied industry professionals about their needs, such as the one for a laying hen research facility in Michigan over a decade ago.
“One thing that I greatly appreciated about M-AAA when I was at MSU was the fact that industries helped drive the priorities for where they’d like research to help make better informed decisions,” Karcher said. “What came out of working with industries and MDARD through this program to fund the creation of this facility was the fact that it wasn’t just Michigan producers who benefitted.
“This actually ended up being instrumental for the laying hen industry as a whole within the U.S.”
Siegford concurred, also noting the importance of M-AAA in funding preliminary research that can later be used to secure funding from larger organizations and agencies.
“M-AAA has been valuable from the perspective of helping me get started on research that other agencies might think is a little too novel or risky, in addition to demonstrating proof of concept,” Siegford said. “With M-AAA-funded research, we as scientists can say, ‘We’re doing this. We’re getting started. Do you want to be a part of it?’”
This story originally appeared on the Agbioresearch website.
