North Carolina State University has received $3.5 million from the US Department of Agriculture's Research Facilities Act Program to establish the National Egg Science and Technology (NEST) Program. Industry partners, the Golden LEAF Foundation and NC State have matched the grant, for a combined investment of $7 million.
Egg producers asked for dedicated facilities where researchers, regulators and industry could work together, because technology testing and inspector training now happen in commercial processing plants, which disrupts their operations.
The programme will have two sites. At the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services' Piedmont Research Station near Salisbury, commercial-scale production research will cover cage-free housing, animal welfare, productivity, genetics and egg quality. On NC State's Raleigh campus, laboratories, processing equipment and training areas will include grading and processing technology able to handle tens of thousands of eggs an hour, used for research, student training and inspector training.
"There is tremendous value in bringing researchers, students, industry and government together around the same table and, in this case, the same equipment," said Garey Fox, dean of NC State's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
The set-up will let researchers follow eggs from the farm through processing and packaging to look for gains in efficiency, quality and food safety, and bring poultry scientists, engineers, veterinarians and food safety specialists together.
Photo: USDA / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Source: Farms.com
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