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Discussing changes in consumer purchasing trends in the egg sector sounds redundant. The great efforts made by the producers to adapt to new and varied demands are already evident. And all this in record time, with no effective interval for the recovery of the amortizations of those investments that the sector had to undertake until 2012.
These new systems, their management, the adjustment of the birds to them, as well as the new sanitary and nutritional needs required, are by now well known to poultry farmers. However, it is necessary to carry out a scrupulous revision of their costs (if it has not already been done), adapted to each production volume, to the idiosyncrasies of each production farm.
Obviously, the cost analysis scheme does not vary with respect to previous scenarios in which we mostly produced eggs in enriched cage systems.
This article aims to carry out this study in a general way, taking into account each cost and its percentage variation with respect to the costs in similar conditions for code 3 productions. It is important to note that all costs and data considered refer to eggs produced on egg belts, without any packing and grading costs in the packing center and no distribution costs.
In any egg production system, the main costs are summarized in:
Feed transformation
Amortization of livestock
Amortization of equipments
Personnel
External services
Supplies (electricity)
Quality costs (declassified egg)
Other costs (health requirements, insurance …)
As we can see in the attached graph, the first four entries in the list above make up 90% of the total costs, so, although we will be reviewing all of them, we must first focus on analyzing the big four.
Cost distribution in enriched cages
As mentioned at the beginning, all the data of this cost study will be expressed as a percentage of cost variation always in relation to the production of eggs in enriched cages. This is due to the logical impossibility of carrying out an economic study that considers all the specific conditions of each company, as well as the heterogeneity of the size and the productive structure of the different farms (floor, free-range and organic eggs), since in some cases they are part of a project to be completed in the coming years.
EGG PRODUCTION
Before reviewing each of the main cost lines, we must set the divisor of all the items that make them up in relation to the number of eggs per housed hen in enric...
