Father and son farmers investing in eggs and pumpkins

Blake and Glen Jennings are proud of the enriched cage housing in their new layer barn. (Dan Woolley photos)

by Dan Woolley

Egg farmer Glen Jennings is in the midst of a major reconstruction and modernization of his Bayview Poultry Farms’ infrastructure in Masstown, N.S.

 “We are moving into a new barn,” said Jennings recently. “It will house 8,000 layers, but with room to expand.”

 He broke ground for the new structure in the spring of 2020.

“I had hoped to be in the new barn and producing eggs by last November,” he said. But the COVID-19 pandemic delayed completion of the project. He now plans to have the new barn finished by the end of April, but because of the farm’s flock cycles, it won’t be occupied until early November.

 The new housing has capacity for as many as 11,000 hens and Jennings hopes the Canadian egg industry will experience increased market demand so he can expand his flock. “If there is any quota available, we would certainly try to purchase it,” he said

Bayview raises its own replacement pullets.

The farm currently produces a little less than 14,000 eggs daily. Jennings noted that COVID-19 disrupted the national egg market; the table market increased by 9.6 percent, but the food service market decreased by 23 percent.

 The new 45-by-210-foot barn has four rows of enriched cages, three tiers high, equipped with perches and scratch pads. The layer housing is also equipped with automatic feed and watering systems. There’s also an automated egg collection belt running from both the new barn and the adjacent older barn into the new packing room. The packing room has a semi-automatic Diamond packer for placing the eggs in trays. A farm employee stacks the trays in a cooler.

 The German company Big Dutchman is building Bayview’s new layer housing with materials shipped from the company’s Michigan warehouse.

 The barn Jennings is replacing was built in 1996 and its production machinery is now at the end of its service life. He plans to renovate the building to raise pullets.

In 2007, Jennings erected several windmills to generate on-farm electricity. However, he’s decommissioned them because their bearings have worn out, replacement parts are hard to find, and the windmill manufacturer has gone out of business.

According to Glen Jennings’s son Blake, they left the windmills’ supporting infrastructure of tower pads and wiring in place as they could be used for new wind turbines or rotating solar panels in the future.

 In the meantime, Bayview has a new alternative power source with 90 solar panels mounted to the roof of the new barn. The panels, which feed their solar energy into three inverters in the new barn, produce more power for the farm than the wind turbines they replaced. Any surplus power will be fed into the power grid, and Nova Scotia Power will remit an annual payment for this power to Bayview.

 Bayview’s layers and pullets are fed a flax seed-based ration supplied by the Sollio Agriculture feed mill in Truro. The layers produce omega-3-enriched eggs, which the Jennings ship to Maritime Pride Eggs in Amherst, which distributes them to the retail grocery market.

 Bayview is also known for its annual crop of 70 acres of pumpkins. Glen’s father Cecil had previously grown squash. But Glen, a 1989 Nova Scotia Agricultural College graduate, shifted to pumpkins and planted the first few acres in his early 20s.

 At age nine, Blake got involved, operating a roadside stand selling pumpkins. He’s now responsible for Bayview’s pumpkin production. “When I got my driver’s licence, I started delivering them to Sobeys,” said Blake. “I am now the largest pumpkin grower in Atlantic Canada. I supply the Sobeys warehouse in Debert and they distribute them to Newfoundland-Labrador and all across the Maritimes.”

In 2019, Blake built a 50-by-155-foot pumpkin storage barn. He fertilizes his pumpkins with manure from the Bayview poultry flock.

 Bayview Poultry Farms is a fifth-generation family enterprise. “My great-grandfather tried several different things – dairy, pigs, field crops,” said Glen. “But we have been in poultry since the late 1940s.”

 Another branch of the Jennings family operates the neighbouring Baywater Farms dairy operation.