There's no mistaking the smell of chickens when walking into the new building at Kreider Farms' egg operation in Mount Joy.

It takes a lot of hens to produce the fresh eggs consumed by the 60 million people who live between Boston and Richmond, Va., and nearly 10 percent of them are housed in Kreider's four egg operations in or near Lancaster County, company officials say.

Kreider Farms has about 4 million hens laying those eggs, and about 450,000 of them are housed in that one new chicken house.

But the odor from those 450,000 hens is nothing compared with the smell one encounters from the 65,000 hens in the 25-year-old building next to the new one.

Even with most of the manure cleaned out of the old chicken house, the smell of ammonia from the droppings is almost overwhelming. In the new one, the odor of ammonia is nonexistent.

And that is just one of the advanced sanitary features incorporated into the new building.

"It gives us an extremely clean egg," said Tom Beachler, Kreider's vice president of operations. "You don't see one fly. You don't see one fly speck. It's a fantastic improvement."

The new building in Mount Joy is the just the latest advanced chicken house that Kreider Farms has constructed since 2002, all with advanced sanitary features, and work is under way to build four more at Kreider's Manheim operation.

Each new $4 million steel and aluminum structure will occupy the same, 600-foot-long footprint of the building it replaces. And each will house about four times as many hens, but with more wing-spreading room for each chicken.

"There's more room, better air, a better life for the chickens," Beachler said.

The work represents not only an upgrade of Kreider's egg operations but also a large expansion, from 2 million hens in 2002 to the current 4 million to 5.2 million by early 2011, when the next four buildings are finished.

Kreider's is counting on the enhanced quality of its eggs, coupled with transportation advantages, to capture market share from eggs now being trucked in from the Midwest.

"We're confident we're going to be able to corner enough of the market" to justify the expense of construction, said Dave Andrews, vice president of sales and marketing. "We're raising the bar, and a lot of people can't do that. They can't afford to do that."

More than moo
For a long time, people knew Kreider Farms more for the restaurants it once ran, then sold, than its core farming operations, Andrews and Beachler said.

Even today, people may associate the company with its 2,000-cow dairy operation and the Krieder brand milk and ice cream it produces more than its eggs, most of which are sold under a variety of non-Kreider retail labels.

But the dairy operation accounts for only about 10 percent of Kreider Farms' business, and eggs about 90 percent, Beachler said. Of Kreider Farms' 225 employees, about 175 work in eggs.

Eggs are big business in Lancaster County, not just for Kreider's Farms.

"In Lancaster County, we produce enough eggs to feed almost 12 million people," said Gary Willier, agriculture services director for the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Pennsylvania is the third leading state in egg production, and Lancaster County leads the state, followed by Berks, Lebanon and York counties, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The state is also the fourth leading milk producer, with Lancaster County's 102,000 dairy cows more than double the number in any other county.

Kreider Farms accounts for a large proportion of the county's egg production, but a much smaller proportion of its dairy cows.

"We tell people, in the egg business we're an 800-pound gorilla; in the dairy business, we're a frog," Andrews said, referring to the frog at the bottom of the company's Web site.

Contented chickens
The size of Kreider Farms' egg operations made it a target in 2005 for animal rights protesters objecting to the caging of chickens.

Kreider's agreed to settle a complaint with the Better Business Bureau by changing its advertising to say "contented" chickens instead of "happy" chickens.

Standing in the new building in Mount Joy listening to the clucking from its vast rows of laying hens, Beachler uses "contented" to describe the sound.

The new cages have about 14 percent more space for each hen than the old cages.

Chickens naturally flock together, and each of the new colony cages provides plenty of room for 10 hens to move around, flap their wings and lay down to sleep, Beachler said.

Still, Kreider's does sell eggs from cageless and free-range chickens, which it buys from other smaller egg operations in the area.

If more than 5 percent of consumers started buying free-range eggs, Kreider Farms would probably start producing those eggs, too, Andrews said.

However, providing the same level of sanitary conditions for free-range chickens would be impossible.

Visitors are required to don paper overalls and plastic shoe covers, and are questioned about their contacts with birds before being allowed to step inside the chicken houses.

Surfaces inside the buildings are swabbed periodically and tested for salmonella, Beachler said.

If the swabs come back positive, Kreider Farms diverts the eggs from the affected building so they're not sold on the fresh egg market.

During the five years the company has been producing eggs at its Mount Pleasant operation in Lebanon County's South Annville Township, not a single swab has come back positive, Beachler said.

Kreider's is using the same technology in the new buildings in Mount Joy and Manheim that went into the $12 million Mount Pleasant project.

New versus old
Older chicken houses used wood-framed construction, which can harbor bacteria and rodents, with manure pits under the cages, which attract flies.

The new buildings are made of steel and aluminum, which is virtually rodent-proof, fire-proof and more sanitary. Each row of cages has its own conveyor belt that removes all manure once a day.

"Removing the manure is a tremendous health and quality benefit," Beachler said.

The new configuration allows cages to be stacked in tiers 12 high instead of just three high in the older buildings.

Electric-driven cart feeders keep the hens pecking by making seven passes a day.

Eggs roll from the cages onto conveyor belts that transport them to a nearby production building.

New packaging lines that are being installed as part of the upgrade use all stainless steel, automatic equipment that can detect dirt or cracks while sorting and grading the eggs, to the tune of 15,000 dozen an hour, all without the eggs ever being touched by a human hand.

The new buildings are also more comfortable for the hens. Older chicken houses tend to overheat in the summer. The new buildings include tunnel ventilation systems with misters that move air along at a steady 10 mph at temperatures 5 to 7 degrees cooler than the outside air in hot weather.

In the winter, sidewall blowers lift heated air over the aluminum curtain walls inside the building and through tubes to provide uniform heating for the birds and drying for the manure.

Chicken manure is a big deal at Kreider Farms. It takes 160,000 tons of grain grown on about 40,000 acres of cropland to feed 4 million chickens, and that translates into 50,000 tons of manure a year, Beachler said.

That manure is processed and marketed as fertilizer, and the new drying system will help lock in the nitrogen and ensure a consistent product.

Some of the chicken manure is mixed with cow manure and will be used in the new Bion manure digester planned for construction at Kreider Farms.

The state announced last week that it has approved the carbon credits and other requirements for a $7.8 million loan for Bion to build the electricity-generating digester.

Down the road
After the current chicken house upgrades have been completed in 2011, Kreider Farms will still have about 25 percent of its egg production in older buildings.

Replacing those is not on the drawing board yet, Andrews said, but ultimately, that is the direction the company is headed.

The newest of the old buildings are at Kreider Farms' egg operation in Middletown, and they will be replaced last, Beachler said.

In the meantime, the company has already upgraded that operation with the new stainless steel packaging equipment.

Beachler said Kreider Farms was packaging about 4,200 dozen eggs an hour when he started working there in 1979. Now, its four egg operations combined package 48,000 dozen eggs an hour, more than 11 times as many as 30 years ago.

That trend is likely to continue as the company replaces more of its buildings.

These are the only steel chicken houses going up east of the Mississippi, Beachler said, and they offer tremendous advantages in food safety and cost effectiveness.

"We expect we're going to have this edge over the competition for quite some time," Andrews said.

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Dennis Larison is editor of the business section and can be reached by telephone at 291-8753 or by e-mail at dlarison@lnpnews.com.