Georgia company ready to hatch egg facility in Thousand Islands Agri-Food Park | Business

Each week, all of these one million broiler hatching eggs will hatch over a four-day period. The rest of the week will be dedicated to cleaning up this massive production.

“You won’t see any of these eggs at the grocery store,” said Corry J. Lawler, owner of Lawman Construction Group and partner in Design Build Innovations (DBi), the company that built the hatchery over the past two years . .

Female chicks will be trucked from the $20 million facility to farms to lay more eggs, while male chicks will head to chicken processing plants to grow up and be used for broilers.

Once the hatchery is in full production, neighbors will never know about the activity taking place there. No smells or noises will come out of the building, Lawler insisted.

The Watertown Daily Times joined about 20 employees from the DBi office on Wednesday for a nearly 90-minute tour of the facility to learn about the extensive process of hatching many chicks in such a short time.

Building the facility was also a lengthy process. Joined by DeWayne Hardwick, project manager at CWT, Lawler visited several Canadian hatcheries to “see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.”

With Hardwick’s guidance, the project and hatching process changed dramatically, resulting in a much more efficient facility, Lawler said.

For example, hatchery employees must use a more complicated process to clean the incubator rooms after the eggs hatch. They have to carry pipes to the incubation rooms.

Not at the CWT hatchery, Lawler said. The installation avoids this thanks to a cleaning process which will be carried out without using external pipes.

Lawler knew “absolutely nothing” about hatcheries before the CWT project, he said. It was a learning process to arrive at the best and most efficient installation possible, he said.

He is proud that panels, with 1-inch insulation made by the Lawler Company, were used in the construction.

And he’s proud that all construction of the facility and its complex mechanical system was done by his crews, while CWT Farms oversaw the installation of the equipment.

The developer is Michael E. Lundy, owner of the agribusiness park. He commissioned CWT Farms to build the hatchery here and worked with local government officials and the Jefferson County Industrial Development Agency to gain support for the project.

During Wednesday’s tour, Lawler highlighted the complexity of the process and the installation itself.

The hatchery’s temperature is controlled at 65 degrees and uses only fresh air inside to prevent eggs and the facility from being exposed to bacteria or infections, Lawler explained.

The facility will employ 172 workers.

Thousands of eggs arrive near the back of the hatchery and are quickly placed in the receiving room and put on “strollers” before heading to one of 36 incubators inside the facility.

The eggs are kept warm and turned automatically at regular intervals. This simulates the care they would receive from a mother hen.

After about 21 days, chicken eggs begin to hatch. The incubators are then opened to reveal thousands of chicks that have pecked their way out of their shells.

The chicks end up on horizontal equipment, where employees determine their sex. If the wings are oriented in one direction, they are female. If the wings are turned the other way, it is determined to be males, Lawler said.

He remembers hearing a buzzing sound the first time he and Lundy went to one of the Canadian hatcheries. It was the sound of thousands of chicks chirping, he said.

“It’s a sound you don’t forget,” he says.

Once the hatching process is complete, they return to a long, two-bay shipping area, where they are placed on trucks and shipped to their destination.

The hatchery then faces a massive cleanout to prepare for the next batch of broiler hatching eggs. A huge amount of eggshells can wreak havoc on a local sewage treatment plant. At CWT’s facility, eggshells are crushed and processed into sand-sized calcium that won’t cause potential environmental problems, Lawler said.

The hatchery will operate 24/7, so a 30-foot-long generator sits on the side of the building and is ready for use. This would provide 100% backup power at all times, Lawler said.

CWT is owned by Aviagen, which has operated a genetic hatchery at the Jefferson County Corporate Park in Watertown for years.

Two weeks ago, Jay Matteson, county agricultural coordinator and Jefferson County deputy general manager of economic development, was among a group of local dignitaries who toured the hatchery. He was impressed.

“Its technology and size are magnificent,” he said.

His office and JCIDA have supported both Route 3 and the corporate park facilities, he said.

Those efforts helped create a reputation for the county as playing a major role in developing a Canadian market for eggs because of its proximity to the northern border, he said.

Jefferson County has become the state’s leading county for the egg industry, he said. Lawler and his company are ready to grow the egg industry in Jefferson County.

As CWT Farms explores other possible new hatcheries, DBi will be ready if asked to hatch the next project.

“We did it here,” Lawler said.