Steve Davie Shows Us into the Egg Sorting Room

This is the candling machine. You put the egg over the top, look for any cracks in them, and away they go. What they do then is this weighs them, so you’re number one to number seven. That’s a number two, so that’s a 65 to 70 gram egg. Number three, 60 to 65, all the way down. So when you first start, they’re all sixes and sevens, and slowly over the last couple of months they’ve grown.

We get mostly threes at the moment, which is a 720 to 780 gram egg. So, then we do them in trays of ones, twos, threes, fours, fives. There’s a restaurant over there so you sell them in boxes of 15 dozen. So they get it in trays of six, six by two and a half – that’s their 15 dozen. Others here are for delivery tomorrow. So it’s a matter then of just working out who your customer is the next day and packing that way.

Woman: Do you still use the air-conditioner in here to keep it at below 18 degrees?

Steve: Yeah, below 18. …

Man: And when – you don’t have to stamp?

Steve: No, we have to stamp them. So then you can see that green stamp on there.

Man: Okay. That’s an individual process.

Steve: That’s an individual process, but you get very quick at it and do the whole stack. I don’t know the purpose of it ‘cause if you crack an egg –

Woman: So it’s sorted into sizes?

Steve: Sorted into sizes, yeah.

Woman: And what’s this tag say on it?

Steve: It’s our property identification code, which is BCD4, I think.

Woman: Okay.

Steve: Sorry, weight.

Woman: Weight?

[10:00] Steve: Weight into a size so same, same. Number one is greater than 70 gram. But I was just saying that when we first started they were all sixes and sevens, so all pullet size. They’ve all moved up there, we don’t get any sixes or sevens anymore. We probably get about 18 out of 450 are fives, so we’ve got very few 600 gram eggs, all the rest are 700 plus.

This is a clip from “Walk the Talk” with Steve Davie: Resilience Through Diversity filming available for Farming Secrets Members.