We were up early to be organised for when Laurie Powter came to escort us to the egg farm owned by himself and his brother.  The egg farm is named 'Lyndale Latrobe Valley Farm Fresh Pty Ltd'.  They market their eggs as 'Latrobe Valley Farm Fresh Eggs'  and 'Gippslands Own Eggs'.  There were also cartons of 'Meggles Farm Eggs' and 'Homebrand Eggs'.  'Sunny Queen Farm Eggs' were in the big cartons of 30 eggs and then there were the 'Caterer's Choice' boxes.   All this set the mind 'a thinking'!  As Lauries said to me 'An egg is an egg'!The farm was between Traralgon and Morwell on the Old Melbourne Road.  We met Laurie and his wife Wendy at Batemans Bay Caravan Park and had a discussion or two on different farming practices.  Laurie was keen to talk with a grain producer as grain is their biggest cost and grain price is the main factor determining a good or a bad year for them!   Of course marketing is the other, but they do try to have procured contracts two years in advance.  They purchase grain six months in advance and use around 270 tonne a week.   Laurie said for every 1.5kgs of grain the chooks eat, they produce 1 kg of eggs.Laurie and his brother started the business many years ago and around 1995 decided to truly modernise the enterprise.  Currently they have six sheds, each housing 50,000 egg laying chooks!  There is another shed that houses the next replacement of chickens.  There is provision to increase the enterprise to have 1 million chickens!  Now that is a lot of chooks!   Every 82 weeks new chickens are put into each of the sheds and the cost for 50,000 young hens is around $500,000.  The technology for the sheds is Italian and what a set up!  A generator plant is a necessity as the stock would be dead within half an hour without power to control the temperature, feed and water to the chickens.  The generator would have certainly been going when they had the fires in the Morwell area in February.  The fire burnt right up to the back of the property and there was a lot of burnt country on the Princes Highway at Morwell.They have found the best egg layers are the ISA Brown chicken and breeders are continually improving the genetics. Laurie is hopeful that it will not be too much longer before they are able to keep the chickens for 100 weeks.  I think he said they average something like 9.6 eggs from the hen every 10 days.  So not quite an egg a day!  So if my maths are correct that means well over 3 million eggs to be sorted and packed every 10 days!  Eggs, eggs and lots of eggs!!  As with everything these days there are regulations they must comply to and with their modern technology, a printout is at their fingertips!  Each chicken has to have an area space of 15cm x 15cm.   That regulation is probably changing to 14cm x 14cm next year.  Such changes will help with the profitability of the enterprise.  Everything is computerised and we were pretty impressed with the way he rattled the figures off to us!  He and his brother are way past retirement age.  They have the business on the market and it is set up now, that they can regularly take a few months off.  We actually started our tour in the egg sorting shed.  The eggs are sorted and packed three times a week.  So every second day this impressive technology is started up and the eggs are conveyed from the laying shed to the sorting shed, via a series of collecting apparatus and belts.  Its a long way from the days when they were collected by hand!  There is a machine that washes, dries, turns the eggs so they are all facing the same way, checks for cracks and blood spots and then places them in cartons.  It was purchased from Holland at a cost of $1.3 million.  It seems hard to believe that it only took three days for the experts to set it up.   It paid for itself in no time with the reduction in staff.  The Powters have a team of reliable women who are employed to pack the cartons into boxes. The box is then conveyed to a machine that tapes the box up.  From there they go onto pellets and into the coolroom. For transporting another fancy machine puts the unbreakable tape around and across the boxes on the pellet.  Wonderful technology for the industry!Laurie said he would give us some eggs to take with us and we thought a dozen or two would have been nice!  But we ended up with a box, not a couple of cartons.  15 dozen in fact!  So it has been scrambled eggs for breakfast this week!  After a coffee in the Lyndale Boardroom and extending our thanks to Laurie for sharing his story of egg production in the Latrobe Valley and how he 'Milks Chooks',  we hit the Princes Highway again en route to Frankston.  It rained all the way and we had showers to deal with whilst we were setting up.  Yea!  I guess we have to expect that!  We are now into the middle of April and we are near Melbourne!  We have been told though, this is an early start for them over here.  The forecast is for cloudy weather for a few more days, hopefully not too much rain!

We are looking forward to checking out Phillip Island, Mornington Peninsula and a trip or two to Melbourne.  14 photos