Egg size, uniformity and revenue start with soybean meal consistency

15 April 2026

7 minute read

By: Sarah Mikesell

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Thomas D’Alfonso, PhD, Worldwide Animal Nutrition Focus Area Director for the U.S. Soybean Export Council, recently spoke to The Poultry Site’s Sarah Mikesell about how layer operations must deliver consistent egg weight, shell quality and production volume – day after day, flock after flock. 

Layer producers and their nutritionists spend enormous energy managing feed cost, but is feed cost the right performance metric for a layer operation? What happens to the conversation when you shift the focus to revenue per dozen instead? 

Layer producers are focused on profit. Profit means that you want revenue to be higher than costs. Yes, costs are important, but revenue is more important. There are important ways to get higher revenue in layer operations, and this involves choosing soybean meal derived from U.S. Soy. 

Egg buyers, whether retailers or food service customers, price and specify by size and grade. What does a producer lose in dollar terms when a percentage of eggs shift from large or extra large into medium or downgrade categories? How controllable is that risk through nutrition?

Nutrition is one of the most important factors that contribute to the variability of animal protein performance. In the case of layers, we look at egg size distribution. I studied this topic for my dissertation many years ago, but it's still relevant today.  You need to understand what the sources of variance are in your operation, and focusing on quality control will bring payback. That payback comes when your birds produce eggs more uniformly and reach that target weight range. If they're too small or too big, they don't get a premium value per unit. When they are more uniform, then you get more revenue. That's why having consistent sources of important ingredients in the diet contribute to that. 

One thing that's unique about laying flocks is that producers have performance data every single morning. How does that change the way you think about nutritional consistency? What does it mean for detecting the cost of ingredient variability before it becomes a serious problem? 

One of the reasons I enjoy working with layers for research purposes is that if you're collecting individual eggs just about every single day, you have lots of degrees of freedom. That means you can conduct really good research on how the performance of those layers is being affected by changes in barn temperature, lighting and diet. 

When you have highly consistent digestible amino acids and metabolizable energy, you have much more consistent performance. When you get an ingredient that does not have the nutrients that are expected, you can see it in animal performance. In this case, egg mass production is an indicator of the factors that influence profitability and performance. 

When nutritionists talk about standardized ileal digestibility of amino acids, it’s a technical concept. Can you translate it? What does higher or more consistent digestibility mean in terms of what's happening inside the hen? Why does it matter for your bottom line? 

You want the nutrients to be digested by the animal in the gastrointestinal tract and absorbed and used for productive means, whether that's an essential amino acid or calories. You don't want them going to the bugs in the digestive tract. You want them going to the animal. We say, “feed the beast, not the bugs.” 

It's a complex system. The digestive system and the microflora work together. A healthy digestive system means you have better digestibility. That standardized ileal digestibility that you mentioned is very technical, but it’s a precise place in the gastrointestinal tract where most of the absorption of nutrients has already occurred. You want to measure how much digestibility there is in a feed ingredient by looking at how much went to the animal as opposed to the bacteria in a large intestine. 

Research comparing soybean meal from different origins has shown meaningful differences in amino acid digestibility, not just at the average level, but in how much that digestibility varies from batch to batch. Why does variability matter as much as or more than the average digestibility level when you're formulating a commercial layer diet? 

Let's first talk about the source of variance at harvest of soybeans. In the United States, the soybeans are dried naturally in the field. They don't require mechanical drying.  In South America, typically in tropical climates, there’s high moisture, and they have to dry the beans before putting them in the supply chain. This drying is imprecise. Typically, there's wood-fired burners that are burning eucalyptus logs to provide that drying. That's just adding variability because not all of it is dried well, and some of it's over dried and even heat damaged. 

When that meal is produced and gets to the animal, you can't visibly see digestibility, unless it's an extreme example. The animal will tell you. Animals and nutritionists like consistent diets. When nutritionists see high variability in the nutritional quality of the ingredients batch after batch, they penalize those ingredients and reduce their assumptions about how many nutrients are in it. They can't count on those nutrients from batch to batch. 

Fortunately, for nutritionists who are sourcing soybean meal derived from U.S. Soy, they can rely on consistently highly digestible essential amino acids and metabolizable energy to formulate diets more precisely. There’s less variability in that diet that reaches the animal, and the animal can convert that into eggs much more efficiently. 

If there's a lot of variability, then the animal overcompensates by eating more feed, having worse feed conversion and really costing the operation. You may be tempted to buy a lower price ingredient, but if it's highly variable, you're going to be paying for it in terms of feed formulation cost, or worse, animal performance. 

Research has shown that the protein source used during pullet rearing, not just the laying period, affects egg quality outcomes, including shell strength and albumin integrity. How does that change the way producers and integrators should think about ingredient specifications during pullet development? 

Animal nutrition is important to focus on getting the animal off to a good start. For a broiler, that's the starter feed. In the case of layers, it's a very dynamic system. The first 16 weeks involve raising the pullets to get them ready to start laying. If they are not uniform, they're going to come into production at different times and you're going to see an overall decrease in that peak performance. 

You can only reach peak performance if most of the birds in the operation are laying about an egg a day. You can see production rates approaching 100%, certainly in the high 90s, but that's only possible if the pullets were raised with consistent, highly digestible nutrients in their diets and well-managed operations, including temperature, lighting and management. 

Having a consistent diet is one of the most important factors when it comes to profitability. It's one of the biggest costs, but it's also the biggest source of animal protein being produced. We're converting nutrients in the diet to eggs. 

Layer operations supplying retail or food service customers in international markets are increasingly asked to document the sustainability of their supply chain, including their feed ingredients. How does U.S. Soy's sustainability story connect to a layer producer's own business development and customer relationships? 

The layer industry in particular is under the microscope regarding how animals are raised, fed and handled. Their well-being is very important. 

The easiest way for a layer producer to document a reduction in carbon footprint is very simple - adopt a preference for soybean meal made from U.S. Soy. That choice provides a quantifiable and verifiable way of documenting a reduction in carbon footprint. With our sustainable U.S. Soy process, you can calculate the carbon footprint, and compare that to other origins such as Brazil, Argentina and India. 

U.S. Soy has the lowest carbon footprint by far. This happens for a few reasons. Our land use is a factor. We simply produce more soy with the same amount of land and don't need to tear down rainforests to do so. That's a simple answer. 

Another factor leans into the business aspect of production. The practices of U.S. Soy farmers are sustainable for long-term business purposes. About 95% to 96% of all soy produced in the U.S. comes from a family-owned farm that are typically passed from generation to generation. They don't want to waste the inputs to the soil or their management practices just to get a sustainability label. They do it because it makes business sense. 

The result is a very consistent product with high nutrient levels because of the organic matter in the diet. Those animal producers can document carbon footprint reduction, and when their animals perform more uniformly and there’s less feed waste, these things add up. When you choose U.S. Soy, you get an immediate reduction in carbon footprint because of that choice. You monitor animal performance and get better feed efficiency. That's less feed wastage. That's another way of calculating sustainability. 

Companies that adopt a philosophy of being sustainable tend to be better-run businesses. They gather better data; they have better documentation; they have better quality control across their entire operation and that leads to better profitability.