Brooklyn Lewellen has seen plenty of eggs, but the amount she saw on Feb. 8 was staggering.
The seventh grader at Pershing Middle School has some experience with livestock, thanks to her aunt raising goats, cows and chickens. During a tour of Vital Farms' facility in Springfield, Lewellen was floored by all the eggs she saw.
“I have never seen so much of the same thing at once,” Lewellen said. “I mean, we can go to a store and see eggs, but never like millions.”
Lewellen was one of 14 students taking part in Springfield Public Schools’ AgVenture program, a special short course for seventh graders interested in agriculture. Over four days across February, the students get an in-depth look at agricultural opportunities and careers through visits to businesses and farming operations.
The students on Feb. 8 took a tour of Vital Farms, a distributor in northwest Springfield that offers pasture-raised eggs to stores and restaurants across the country. The company works with about 350 poultry farms that use a pasture-raising technique for raising egg-producing hens.
Students walked through the distributor’s entire preparation process, including cold storage for freshly delivered eggs, a robotic washing and drying process, another robotic process for weighing and sorting eggs into cartons, packaging them all for delivery, and how final products are checked for quality.
Spencer Young, operations administrative assistant with Vital Farms, led Thursday’s tour and took a variety of questions about the process. He shared that it takes an egg about four minutes to go through that entire process, which has about 20 steps. The company prepares about 6 million eggs a day, he said.
Young said he gives tours of Vital Farms' operation regularly, mostly to students. He said he appreciates the opportunity to not only talk about the company, but also highlight the company’s philosophy of ethical treatment of livestock.
“It’s about trying to plant little seeds that they can dwell on,” Young said. “We emphasize the pasture-raised construct of our business. There is a tremendous uphill battle with trying to establish all these catchy terms in the egg industry and how our eggs are genuinely pasture-raised.”
Becoming a supplying farmer for Vital Farms requires producers to follow a list of pasture-raising practices that include devoting about 108 square feet of space per hen, and allowing land to rejuvenate naturally without relying on pesticides or herbicides.
Moments before a tour of the preparation floor started, AgVentures instructor Justine Lines stopped the students in an office area, where people were working at desks. She pointed out that these kinds of jobs can be found in the agriculture industry.
“The jobs that we think of in agriculture are not just farmers working in fields,” Lines said. “It’s everything, including harvesting science, computer programming, genetics, animal husbandry, veterinarian services. The list goes on.”
Previous activities included meeting with the Future Farmers of America (FFA) groups at Hillcrest and Glendale high schools. After the Vital Farms tour, the students were scheduled to visit Missouri State University’s Shealy Farm, a cattle-raising operation. Lines said the students would learn about a paddock-feeding method that rotates grasslands.
Lines said the industry is in need of people — there are about 93,000 agricultural jobs in the state of Missouri, and the average age of farmers are about 53.
“Over the next 20 years, we’re going to have to supply thousands of agricultural workers into our economy,” Lines said. “Hopefully these students will go and get inspired in some way to have a career and continue on with agriculture.”
Students asked a variety of questions during the tour, including about how many eggs were broken across the entire process (Young said the company budgets for 2% waste, which can amount to about 120,000 eggs a day) and the cost of the robotic machines doing the work.
Seeing the plant kept Lewellen interested in the area, she said. She has been riding horses since she was 2 years old, and has wanted to be a veterinarian since she was 4. But the size of agriculture’s world opened up for her after the tour, she said.
“I thought people would have just a few chickens and sell stuff in a local market,” Lewellen said. “Now I know there are places that have like a thousand chickens.”
