By Leeann Minogue
The Colborn family has maintained their poultry operation for over a century
Shawn Colborn is a fifth-generation poultry producer at Delisle, Saskatchewan, but he’s not likely to be the last Colborn in the egg business. For more than a century, the Colborn family has made egg production a part of their multi-generation family farm.
While the first generation of Colborns kept a few chickens, the second generation, Henry Colborn, started improving hen housing on the farm, retrofitting the horse barn into a chicken barn in the 1930s. In the early 50s, the third generation, Keith and Cliff, built the first Colborn barn dedicated to table egg production.
Keith’s grandsons Shawn and Jeff, along with Cliff’s son Darren, make up the fifth generation of Colborns in the poultry business, producing table eggs alongside their grain operation and cattle herd.
Poultry production has changed dramatically over the years. In the old days, Keith remembers, “you’d put about 500 chickens in a brooder house.” They heated the building with an oil-burning stove during the winter, and when it was warm enough, Keith says, they let the birds out to run. When it was time to bring them back in the fall, “sometimes we’d get quite a few back and sometimes we’d lose quite a few.” Foxes were a particular problem.
Keith’s brother Cliff remembers upgrading to a hen house and keeping birds on the floor. “We used to have a lot of disease problems,” Cliff says. Changing to wire housing lifted the birds up off the floor and away from manure. “You come out with a lot healthier bird,” Keith says.
Today the Colborns have two barns for laying hens and one pullet barn where hens are raised for the next production cycle. One of the laying barns is a conventional unit, and the second is an enriched barn. Enriched housing gives laying hens more space and privacy than conventional units. The birds have more opportunities to act naturally, with access to scratching pads, rods where they can perch, and water and feed on demand. Shawn says enriched housing is the best direction for sustainability, and “it’s a great way to produce an egg.”
These technology upgrades have not only made the hens healthier, but they’ve also increased egg production. While one bird used to produce 15 dozen eggs per year, the Colborns’ well-cared for hens lay up to 28 dozen eggs annually. Shawn also attributes this increase to investments in research, equipment, and bird genetics.
Eggs from Farm to Table
In this course, you will learn how eggs get from the farm to your table.
Growth in egg production has taken place not just on the Colborn farm, but throughout Canada’s egg industry. For all egg producers, environmental conditions, water and feed are all monitored daily, and the vast majority of producers have electronic systems that monitor all these conditions 24/7 every day of the year. Egg producers need to pass third-party audits of their farms which review practices and facilities to ensure that their hens receive optimal care. Canada’s Egg Quality Assurance program also requires that farms and processors are regularly inspected to ensure safety and quality standards are met so that consumers can be assured of the quality of the eggs they buy.
Production methods have changed over the years and so has egg marketing. The Colborns have been part of that change. Keith was a founding member of the Saskatchewan Egg Board, an organization that helped develop Canada’s supply management system. Keith recruited farmers to become part of supply management and helped to form the original principles of the underlying quota system. “It did take a lot of work,” Keith says.
Keith’s brother Cliff was also a member of the Saskatchewan Egg Board. He saw it as a good opportunity to learn from other egg producers. Fifth-generation farmer Shawn has also served on the board of directors of the Saskatchewan Egg Producers.
Shawn is proud of the supply management system his grandfather and uncle helped build, and glad that the Colborn family farm is part of it. “It’s the lifeblood of our farm,” Shawn says. “Hopefully it’s going to be part of our future as well.”
