IPPE: Hy-Line focuses on genetic breeding to improve egg production on poultry farms
Hy-Line's genetic research aims to improve lay rates per hen
2 April 2025
5 minute read
By: Tom Dixon, Global Marketing at Hy-Line, was interviewed by The Poultry Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the 2025 International Processing and Production Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
What's new at Hy-Line?
We have a lot of new things going on. Hy-Line is almost a 90-year old company, but we're always innovating, pushing ahead and trying to grow our markets to reach more markets and people. Everything starts with genetics at Hy-Line. We're a genetics company. We have a team of PhD geneticists that get up everyday and their whole job is to make a better laying hen that is more efficient and productive.
The goal in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that we achieve is four eggs per hen housed and a reduction by 5 grams per dozen of feed to egg ratio. That is about a half a gram of feed savings for every egg produced by our white, brown, and tan varieties every year. That's the advancements that our genetics group is making. It’s an important goal for us. This is because our egg producers in the world want a more efficient hen that's going to produce more eggs and be able to feed more people.
What the market demands is what we're going to provide. How we do this is to increase a higher rate of lay. Persistence is especially important. Birds need to reach a high peak, with more weeks over 95%, more weeks over 90%, more weeks over 85%, and just keep that going out to 80, 90, and 100 weeks and beyond.
Our whole genetics program investment is to make that kind of a bird. To make a bird that will persist well and have a long-life of production. That's what the market demands and that's what we're delivering. The genetics is especially important for Hy-Line, and we continue investing in that.
How is the team helping to accomplish this goal?
We can produce a better laying hen, but we need people to work in this business. It's a very people-oriented business in the egg industry all around the world. Hy-Line really values the need to have the best people that have strong skills with technical expertise.
A recent hire that we just added to the team is Jamie McIntosh, who is based in Scotland. He will identify the needs of the market and provide more assistance and support for people in cage-free egg production. This sector of egg production has grown a lot all around the world.
In Europe, cage-free production has been in place for many years and has grown quickly. The rest of the world has been slower to move that direction, but the USA is now 40% or more and growing for non-cage production. I think worldwide, it's now surpassed by 20% of production in those systems. It's an important part of the industry and it's a growing part of the industry.
We feel it's the responsibility of Hy-Line International to support our customers that are in it or that are transitioning over to these new systems. We've invested in Jamie McIntosh to do that. We are extremely excited that he's going to hit the ground running. There is a lot of demand in the market for that kind of support. He's already started that and will be preparing not only for in-person visits, but a lot of materials and maybe some webinars and interviews. He try to spread the message on best practices for getting the best results in the Hy-Line Brown and White varieties in cage-free systems.
Jonathan Cade, the President of Hy-Line, is spending a couple of weeks in Asia and you're doing training in various parts of the world. Tell me about that because it is very much a boots-on-the-ground approach.
As previously mentioned with the new hires, all team members in Hy-Line are out there in the field. Our research team is not sitting in a laboratory, they're out in the market interacting one-on-one with the customers, just so they can see what the market wants. Our goal at Hy-Line is to give the market, the egg producers, the kind of laying hen that makes them more profitable so their businesses can thrive.
We want to be in the markets with those people, even at the top. The President of Hy-Line, Jonathan Cade, travels the world and spends more than 50% of his time in the field in Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, He's traveling the world, so from the top of the company to the research team to our technical services team. This allows us to give the industry what it needs.
If you come to visit us in West Des Moines, Iowa, you might see empty offices because we’re pretty much out on the road to the point that we must plan to be in the office. We understand it's really important to be one-on-one because it's a people industry. We passed it during the pandemic where we're in zoom calls which was good, but it cannot replace the one-on-one direct interactions, stepping into barns where we can and getting into the hatcheries, barns and trade shows just meeting our distributors. Our customers, egg producers, are so valuable to Hy-Line. We are investing in travel to be in the market even more.
What's next for Hy-Line?
Given the travel and education, we've really invested a lot during the last two years in some of these regional road shows and customer meetings. We did one in Indonesia in October 2024. We had almost 400 people at the show. We did one in Zambia, Africa earlier in the year with another large group of people in attendance. The prior year, we held a show in South America with about 350 people in Colombia. We have a lot of these big events, but also a lot of smaller road shows where there might be anywhere from 15 to 30 people.
We have even invited some to come to Iowa to interact with our key influencers. These key people give technical services and function as third-party people bringing them in so they can multiply the message from our own team of people. Then the allied industry can help educate and get the word out. We've just seen that as a powerful tool.
We're continuing to be doing road shows, attending and hosting educational opportunities with customers and being active with the market.
