$6.6M egg sorting plant coming to Great Falls

A new commercial contract to supply eggs to Costco stores in Montana and eastern Washington is driving a construction boom on Hutterite colonies across Montana.

The demand for Montana-grown eggs is expected to double over the next few years, with the potential to draw in $13 million in additional revenues each year for the state’s agriculture economy.

Nearly all that wealth will pass through Great Falls.

To meet the demand, a new egg grading facility will be built on the northern edge of the city. Ground has already been broken on the $6.6 million plant, which will be constructed across from the Great Falls Americans Little League baseball fields off 38th Street North.

When completed in late 2017 or early 2018, the state-of-the-art facility will employ 20 people and have the capacity to receive, grade, sort and ship out in excess of 280 million eggs annually. The egg grading plant is being constructed for Montana Egg, a cooperative of 30 Hutterite colonies spread across Montana.

“It’s good for the economy and good for Great Falls, and the Hutterites are a big part of it,” said Mike Kleinsasser, secretary-treasurer for Montana Egg.

About 98 percent of all the eggs produced for commercial sale in Montana come from the state’s Hutterite colonies. For many years, each colony operated independently and were essentially in competition with each other for the sale of their eggs.

Then, little more than a decade ago, the colonies began working toward a more collaborative approach. In 2006, 30 Montana Hutterite colonies came together to form Montana Egg LLC.

Kleinsasser has been involved with eggs since the Kingsbury Colony, where he lives near Valier, started supplying eggs for Buttrey Food and Drug in 1997. In 2006, Kleinsasser took his present position with Montana Egg when the colonies came together to form the LLC and become USDA certified.

“The Montana Egg project was pretty landmark for the colonies,” said Jolene Schalper, director of Business Development for the Great Falls Development Authority. “You have 30 separate colonies that came together in an agreement that they were going to build this facility and market their eggs under one name.”

“There are about 600,000 laying hens in the colonies right now and by the time it’s all said and done, that number will probably be up around 1.2 million.” said Mike Miller, field operations manager for Wilcox Family Farms.

Wilcox Family Farms is a major egg supplier throughout the Pacific Northwest, with its headquarters in Roy, Washington, a small town in the Nisqually Valley south of Olympia.

Wilcox has been selling eggs in Montana since the 1980s. Originally the eggs were trucked into Billings from farms in the Seattle area. Then about 15 years ago, Wilcox Farms began buying its eggs locally from Montana’s Hutterite colonies.

Working in cooperation with Wilcox Family Farms and with technical support from the GFDA, Montana Egg moved forward with plans to construct a consolidated egg grading facility in 2010. That first plant was completed in 2011, and has been processing eggs from its location off Stuckey Road northeast of Great Falls city limits for the past five years.

“Originally they graded their eggs individually at the colonies,” explained Andy Wilcox, co-owner and operations manager for Wilcox Family Farms. “With the colonies wanting to improve their food safety for their customers, we made the decision in 2010 to work together and put in a central grading facility that had a full time USDA inspector and state-of-the art machinery, both for efficiency and enhanced food safety.”

Wilcox Family Farms had already undertaken its own transformation. In 2005, the company committed itself to becoming the Pacific Northwest’s premier producer of organic cage-free eggs.

Now the majority of Wilcox Family Farms’ chickens are growth hormone free, and fed organic grains grown without the use of pesticides. The chickens have outdoor access and are allowed to roam freely. Wilcox has also developed a unique aviary nesting system to house their chickens, which the company website describes as a “condo for birds.”

“It has several levels allowing cage-free chickens to walk or fly up or down,” the website states. “They can flap their wings, perch and do other natural activities and move about freely. This freedom to move increases the hens bone strength and makes them healthier.”

“At night they’ll jump up into this system, where there are perch bars and that kind of stuff, but no cages,” Miller said. “They all roost up there in nest boxes. When they lay the eggs, the egg will roll down onto a belt. So they can just turn a button on and all the eggs come out along the conveyer in the mornings.”

Wilcox Farms’ reputation for cage-free organic eggs was an important component in securing a supply contract with the Costco Wholesale Corp. To finalize the deal, the Hutterite colonies associated with Montana Eggs have agreed to convert to similar cage-free nesting systems. About half the eggs produced by Montana Egg will also be certified organic.

“The colonies are all building new barns,” Miller said. “They currently have small caged barns, but we’re going larger, cage-free and organic.”

While the transition does represent a substantial investment, Miller points out that many of the existing laying barns are already 30 or 40 years old and too small to accommodate the increase in bird numbers that the increased egg production will demand.

“They’re pretty much at the end of their life, so building these new barns is a good thing for them,” he said of the colonies’ move to a cage-free environment.

The colonies will also be expanding the size of their flocks – in some case tripling or even quadrupling the number of birds they care for. Yet in comparison with the nation’s largest egg producing enterprises, in which a single industrial laying barn might contain a quarter of a million birds, the Hutterite flocks will remain small.

Each Hutterite flock will be held to a maximum of 15,000 birds, with no more than three flocks per colony. Smaller flock sizes help to mitigate the potential of infectious disease spreading among the birds, a significant concern following 2015, when an outbreak of avian influenza killed 48 million chickens and turkeys in the upper Midwest in a single season.

Enormous flock sizes also runs counter to Wilcox Family Farms’ philosophy of egg production.

“People don’t want their food coming from facilities where there’s 2 million birds all on one farm,” Wilcox said. “That’s in stark contrast with the Hutterites. Not only is it local production where we can keep the eggs in Montana and eastern Washington, but also it’s their ability to efficiently produce eggs with smaller flock sizes.”

“That’s a huge component,” he said. “It’s a major factor in preventing avian influenza, in providing better bio-security, giving better attention to the animals and more attention to food safety issues.”

“It’s fairly exciting,” Kleinsasser said of the growth now taking place at Montana Egg. “We should be up and running by this time next year and we will have an open house that the public is invited to to see how it goes and get a feel for it.”

“It’s been a great partnership with the Hutterite colonies,” Wilcox added. “They do a fantastic job with quality and animal welfare. We’ve been working in the Great Falls community since 2011 and have had really good success. We’ve really enjoyed working with Great Falls and we want to continue to invest.”