Since the Ministry of Agriculture launched the initiative to establish standardized livestock and poultry farming demonstration sites, production technology and core competitiveness at livestock and poultry enterprises in China have improved further. Standardized demonstration farms have become showcases for the advanced productivity of animal husbandry, generating substantial social and economic benefits. The layer industry has also made significant progress in standardization. Shanghai and Hubei provide examples: Shanghai’s layer industry has largely achieved large-scale production, with an average of more than 5 ten thousand birds per farm, and more than 90% of layer farms keeping over ten thousand birds; Hubei Province has integrated and adapted the “Layer 153 Standardized Farming Model,” with an average of more than 2 ten thousand birds per farm, and more than 60% of layer farms keeping over ten thousand birds. How to further standardize the layer industry in four areas—production lines, industry knowledge, social support services, and risk control—will be a key and pressing issue for a considerable period to come.
1. Standardization of Layer Farm Production Lines
Standardization of layer farm production lines covers two main areas: facility construction and standardized production. Its core is to adopt an all-in/all-out flock management system. Compared with current standardized farm construction, this approach places greater emphasis on farm specialization and standard operating practices. Building on standardized farm construction, it establishes systematic disease prevention and control for the poultry industry to reduce the incidence of regional diseases. The main focus of standardized farm construction is to equip farms with facilities, including cages, feeding equipment, temperature-control equipment, epidemic-prevention facilities, and manure-treatment facilities. Standardized construction has generally increased egg production per unit of land area. On this basis, standardization of layer farm production lines promotes an all-in/all-out layer production model, under which only layers of the same age are kept on a farm.
The general production model at layer farms in China is to build chick houses, pullet houses, and laying hen houses according to the available land area. Regardless of the farm’s size, birds of different ages are kept concurrently, and eggs are produced 365 days a year. Most layer enterprises keep chicks and pullets as well as laying hens at the same site, and some also handle processing and logistics. A new flock is brought in every 2 to 4 months. Some farms both sell and buy eggs. This allows pathogenic microorganisms originating inside and outside the farm to multiply and develop widespread antimicrobial resistance, to the extent that veterinary drugs and vaccines cannot eradicate them. Most traditional farms have become breeding grounds for pathogenic bacteria and viruses. Changes in the weather can trigger disease outbreaks on farms or regional epidemics. Disease outbreaks occurring 1 to 2 times a year, characterized by sharp declines in egg production rates, have caused considerable losses to China’s layer industry.
All-in/all-out management is a basic veterinary practice. The main reason most farms in China cannot implement it is that the layer industry lacks a modern industrial system with specialized division of labor; the basic national conditions of smallholder production and the associated mindset have not changed. There are currently too few specialized chick and pullet farms. Shanghai has only 2 specialized chick and pullet farms, all of which serve as in-house facilities for their respective enterprises and are unable to provide services to outside customers.
The main goal of standardizing layer farm production lines is to guide farms toward specialized production, including specialized breeding farms, specialized parent-stock farms, specialized chick and pullet farms, and specialized laying farms. First, some newly established farms should be guided to build standardized production lines for the chick and pullet rearing stages, or enterprises operating multiple farms should be guided to reconfigure farm functions when renovating poultry houses. As the number and scale of standardized chick and pullet farms grow, layer farms should be guided to adopt all-in/all-out management for flocks during the laying period, ultimately establishing a specialized division of labor across the layer industry.
2, Standardization of layer farm industry knowledge
Standardizing industry knowledge is intended to improve layer farm managers’ basic professional knowledge related to layer production and knowledge of laws and regulations, and to establish a certification system for taking up the job. While emphasizing hardware development at large-scale poultry farms, it is equally important to standardize software. Just as feed mills, veterinary drug manufacturers, and pet clinics need to meet relevant technical thresholds, managers of standardized layer farms should also have basic knowledge of layer production and food safety. Layer farming is a way for farmers to increase their income. The educational level of people working in China’s layer production industry is relatively low, and they urgently need relevant professional knowledge. Layer production managers need to continually learn about layer production techniques and relevant knowledge, including the Animal Husbandry Law and the Food Safety Law. Standardizing knowledge is a major matter involving food safety. Professionalizing production management personnel is both a way to ensure production standards in layer farming and a fundamental safeguard against food safety incidents.
The “melamine” incident in the dairy cattle industry several years ago, the “Sudan Red” incident in the layer industry, the “drug chicken” incident in the broiler industry last year, and the recent “dead pigs in the Huangpu River” incident in the live pig industry all reflect an industry structure in which smallholder mindsets are widespread among livestock and poultry producers and awareness of the law is weak. If the industry does not strengthen production knowledge training and food safety education for managers, the greater the degree of scaling and facility development at layer farms, the greater the harm caused to the layer industry if a farm engages in non-compliant production. Standardizing industry knowledge means implementing a certification system for taking up the job, based on production technology and legal knowledge training for chicken farm managers. It guides managers of large-scale farms to pursue continuing education and raises the production technology skills and legal awareness of key industry personnel.
3, Standardization of socialized services for layer farms
Standardization of socialized services for layer farms concerns the standardized market provision of feed, vaccines and veterinary drugs, disease testing and control, disposal of dead chickens, and chicken manure treatment for the layer industry. The scaling-up of livestock and poultry farming in China has driven technological progress and rapid growth in the feed and vaccine and veterinary drug industries. Standardization and regulation in these industries are playing an important role in food safety and the healthy development of the layer industry. However, standardized industries have not yet developed in three areas: disease testing and control, disposal of dead chickens, and chicken manure treatment. Most chicken farms have limited capacity for disease testing and control and find it difficult to carry out safe disposal of dead chickens and chicken manure. The main reasons are that this work requires a high level of professional expertise, substantial investment, and has low tangible product value.
In the early stages of large-scale chicken farm development, disease testing and control were mainly carried out by veterinary stations at the county, district, and township levels. As the scale of farming expanded, the functions of veterinary stations also changed, and disease testing and control came to be handled mainly by sales representatives and technical service staff from vaccine and veterinary drug distributors; “drugstores” replaced “hospitals.” There is no shortage of experienced veterinarians, but differences in the interests of the parties involved have made the misuse of vaccines and veterinary drugs a persistent problem in the industry. Some large leading layer enterprises have established organizational systems for disease testing and control, but technical capacity remains weak at many other standardized large-scale farms, which lack the ability to carry out this work. In layer farming areas, for every 100 ten thousand layers, at least 1 disease testing and control centers should be established. These centers should be able to conduct antibody monitoring and testing for pathogenic microorganisms, and help farms provide vaccination services.
In the smallholder economy era, it was not unusual to cook and eat sick or dead chickens or discard them casually. This ingrained way of thinking has made the safe disposal of dead chickens extremely difficult, and is also one of the main reasons epidemics in China cannot be effectively controlled. Burying dead chickens on large-scale farms poses several technical challenges: land resources are limited, making deep burial difficult, and pathogens can contaminate surface water. Incineration is a suitable way to ensure the complete and safe disposal of dead chickens at large-scale farms. However, there are currently very few incineration stations serving chicken farms. In 2012, Shanghai was the first to begin incinerating dead chickens, collecting them from standardized chicken farms for centralized incineration. This project will play a major role in advancing technology in Shanghai’s layer industry.
Chicken manure treatment has long been a challenge for the layer industry. Although large-scale chicken farms have built, or commissioned others to build, facilities for processing chicken manure into organic fertilizer, they have not achieved safe treatment. Chicken manure processing plants built by large-scale farms rarely make a profit, and most need government subsidies to remain operational. In addition, most farms with fewer than 5 ten thousand chickens cannot independently establish a chicken manure processing plant. They mainly sell or deliver fresh manure for processing; if it is not handled properly during the rainy season, it can flow into rivers and cause environmental pollution. Establishing a safe chicken manure treatment model in which manure is “pre-treated at the chicken farm and further processed at an organic fertilizer plant” is necessary to increase the value added from chicken manure production. 100 ten thousand layers require an organic fertilizer finishing workshop with a monthly output of 1 ten thousand tonnes. Safe treatment of chicken manure not only advances technology in the layer industry, but also promotes technological progress in crop farming.
4, Standardization of Risk Control at Chicken Farms
Standardizing risk control at chicken farms is intended to ensure food safety. Antibiotics and other medications are not used during the laying period, and chickens affected by disease, as well as those that may have been infected, are proactively culled. Compensation is provided for culled chickens that are sick or have died. An effective production insurance system for laying hens should be established to provide producers with a basic level of production protection. This would help improve the food safety accountability system and ensure that responsibility for production, distribution, and oversight is put into practice.
Food safety is a major concern now and for the foreseeable future. Chicken farms supply eggs, a primary agricultural product, and are inevitably a high-risk industry, but many people in the sector have insufficient awareness of this. Drug residues in eggs stem from the need to prevent and control disease; the difficulties in disease prevention and control stem from the high cost of culling sick chickens, which chicken farms cannot afford to bear in full. The current Ministry of Agriculture standard for pollution-free eggs (NY5039-2001) specifies maximum residue limits for four categories of antibiotics and stipulates that pathogenic bacteria must not be detected in eggs. As society and the government pay more attention to prohibited drug residues in milk and poultry meat, the issue of drug residues in eggs will also soon receive attention. The management of the layer industry will inevitably fall within the remit of food industry management, and restrictions on antimicrobial and antiviral drugs for laying hens will drive the rapid transformation of the layer industry. Developing a top-level design for standardized layer farms and standardizing farm risk-management systems will help reduce production risks, improve the safety of egg production, and crack down on producers who violate the rules.
Standardized risk-management systems for chicken farms should be based on entry thresholds and exit mechanisms for the layer industry, and should strengthen foundational areas such as disease-control conditions at chicken farms, public health conditions, and the professional and legal knowledge of management personnel. In both traditional layer-farming areas and newly developed areas, more resources should be invested in disease-prevention and public safety conditions at layer farms, alongside investment in farming facilities, to improve the ability to withstand regional risks.
There are many reasons why production insurance systems are difficult to implement, with insufficient total insurance funds being one of the main reasons. At present, Shanghai's subsidy for pigs that die from disease in the pig industry is 80 yuan per pig, and pig-farming enterprises still consider this clearly inadequate. Establishing a production insurance system for laying hens and scientifically planning the sources of insurance funds are fundamental to ensuring that the system can work effectively. Only with sufficient insurance funds can an entire flock be culled when a highly infectious disease occurs. To address the shortage of insurance funds, the government is expected to increase fiscal investment, while appropriate policies are also needed to guide layer enterprises through transformation. Corporate transformation involves integrating capital, technology, and markets, attracting external capital, or pursuing mergers and acquisitions among layer farms, whether through alliances between strong players or the elimination of less competitive ones. Once layer enterprises become stronger, they can obtain some insurance funds through financing channels such as venture capital.
5, Conclusion
The top-level design for standardizing layer farms should guide farms and investors toward the professionalization and socialization of the layer industry. It should provide not only immediate support but also the means to become self-sufficient, establish appropriate policies and systems, pool resources to share the risks of the layer industry, and improve the industry's healthy and sustainable development. Modern society is increasingly concerned about food hygiene and public environmental safety, and the layer industry is becoming more large-scale at an ever-faster pace. Top-level design is therefore increasingly important and requires greater consideration of overall regional planning.