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The conference was organised by John Retson of JSR Services in conjunction with Lohmann GB. John rears more than 100,000 organic pullets each year – all of them Lohmann – along with a number of commercial pullets. He has 15,000 organic layers of his own, and 40,000 free range layers. John was elected vice chairman of the British Free Range Egg Producers' Association at BFREPA's annual conference in November.

The Scottish conference he held this month was in Edinburgh and was attended by customers who buy his organic pullets. John said the mood at the conference was relatively buoyant. Producers were still committed to organic. There was a feeling that the market would recover in a year or so. JSR had not seen any reduced demand for pullets from its customers. "The numbers are not shrinking. We have even been getting enquiries from the north of England and we are happy to supply them as well," said John.

"People are all re-ordering their pullets because they have made their minds up to stay in organic. They realise that there is going to be a little bit of a dull year this year, but nobody is saying they want to deregulate for a year or anything. They believe that after this year that market is here and it is here to stay," he said.

"I think we are a little bit out of balance but not as much as some people would like to lead us to believe. We are slightly out of balance in organic egg production but we are aware of that and that is what we have been discussing at the conference. We have to make sure that we get our costs as tight as possible, our production costs as low as possible so that we can weather this little plateau in sales. But we are very confident that we will farm through this year and into 2010 we will be going back into a positive market. No-one is denying there is going to be a little bit of a lull in 2009, but the mood, I would say, is buoyant."

One of the speakers at the conference was John Dakers, an independent consultant and chairman of Athol Glens Organic Marketing Group. He gave those attending the event an overview of the whole organic market and the percentage of agricultural land taken up by organic in various European countries. In Scotland, four per cent of the ground area was organic, he said.

Athol Glens has seen sales of its organic meat fall by between two and three per cent, but he told the conference he felt there was still a niche market for organic. He said the market always would be there and there could well be a need for more organic ground in the future.

David Bellamy of Green Lees Ltd in Lincolnshire was another speaker. He went into organic egg production in 2000, starting with one 2,000 bird shed. He now has 60,000 organic layers in 40 sheds. All his eggs go to Noble. David described to his audience how he had started in organic and how he had been able to expand the business.

Another organic egg producer, Alec Brewster, spoke to the conference as the chairman of the newly formed Scottish Organic Egg Producers' Group. The group was established in autumn last year. He talked to the conference about a new computer programme that had been developed to enable egg producers to benchmark their own performance by comparing their statistics against those of other producers. "It will enable us to see where our strengths and our weaknesses are in our overall system," said John Retson. "It was shown to the public for the very first time at the conference. We hope to have it running fully by early summer. It is up and running now but needs all the information feeding into it."
The system will be available to all members of the Scottish Organic Egg Producers' Group. Each producer will be able log into the system from his own computer using a secure log-on.
He will be able to feed his statistics into the system and compare the performance of his unit against that of other individuals and against overall average performance.

"Once you are into the system, it will tell you how many figures you are comparing yours with, it will give you averages, the best the worst and so on. It will give you comparisons to different production methods, whether that's multi-tier, standard production, static sheds or mobile sheds," said John, who said a producer would also be able to compare each individual aspect of production. "You can compare all areas of production – mortality, egg size, hen house, the whole thing."

John spoke to the conference about JSR's pullet rearing operations. JSR has eight sheds at four different locations across Scotland's central belt. "We are upgrading some of the square footage. We have been lucky enough to be able to rent some of the ex parent stock breeding farms that breeders have been giving up. We also spoke about the new equipment that we are putting into our rearing farms. Mainly what we are doing is converting all the nipple lines to include a solid perching rail on top to increase perching," said John.

He said the main change and the most costly involved step rearing. Some customers needed multi-tier for organic. They needed a step rearing system and John said this had been particularly successful. "The step rearing has been giving us some tremendous results, so we are converting all our rearing farms to a step rearing system."

John also spoke to the conference about salmonella and transport. "It takes us a whole day to wash a modular system and we are looking for a bit more due diligence where we set down these modules, especially if we are doing a multi-drop because we don't want to be dropping a module down into a feet of muck. We are suggesting to our customers that we need set-down areas prepared so that the modules can be set down and kept clean so that when we go to the next farm we are not dragging somebody else's salmonella muck with us."

John also spoke about laying results and how they had improved in the five years the business had been running. "Some customers have been with me all the time from the start. We have been learning and learning and learning. We used to have some pretty poor results – probably down in the 270 eggs per bird and mortality as high as 20 per cent, even greater. We have been improving at a fairly good rate. We will have a number of flocks exceeding 300 eggs per bird, they will be retaining feathers to at least 80 per cent at depletion and mortality is down to between five and 10 per cent. We are learning from mistakes, our management is getting better, we have got far better pullet weight profiles, feed companies have been very good in improving the spec of their feed formulations and these birds are not beak-trimmed."

This is the third year that the conference has been staged. As well as presentations and discussions amongst producers, there were a number of trade stands at the conference. A total of 18 trade exhibitors travelled to Edinburgh for the event.

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