250K Egg Laying Chickens in Upstate New York, Christina Hudson talks farming during Coronavirus

Vance Crowe [00:00:02] As the crow flies on the Vans Crow podcast, Christina Hudson, welcome to the podcast.

Christina Hudson [00:00:11] Hi Vance. Thanks for having me on.

Vance Crowe [00:00:13] So you are from New York state and actually you're a farmer up in New York state and you raise chickens that lay eggs and I have learned more from you about eggs in the last two months than I ever knew was possible. So how has people's relationship with eggs changed since coronavirus started happening?

Christina Hudson [00:00:35] Well, I'm not really sure if the relationship has changed. Well, there is one thing that has changed. I think people are starting to bake a lot more than they had previously done prior to being in isolation at home. So I've definitely seen more requests for banana bread and other types of baking. But it's been interesting because most of our, basically most of our customers are food service. So one thing that's really changed for us is making that transition from food service to the grocery stores. We did have like our staple grocery stores that we've serviced for years. Green Hills, no, James Nichols. And over the years some of those local grocers have dropped off in our area. So it's been a transition for us to meet that increased grocery store demand.

Vance Crowe [00:01:37] So what is it like to live on an egg farm? Like are you constantly surrounded by chickens running around everywhere? How do, how does this look for people that don't know?

Christina Hudson [00:01:45] Right, so for our farm up here in upstate New York, we're a conventional farm. So that means that our chickens are in cages in barns. So they're away from the elements and we're able to control the temperature and make sure that they're away from, you know, fox and other sorts of things that would want to prey on chickens. So I'm not like hanging out with the chickens. The only chickens I hang out with are, are here really. So I run the egg processing room on my family's farm. We process eggs six days a week. And one thing that would be different is because of the biosecurity. I don't actually see the chickens. Chicken, chicken. I see them on a rare occasion. So just to limit the exposure that they have to other people because of avian influenza and other things that biosecurity is really big. So, and

Vance Crowe [00:02:46] This is going on regardless of coronavirus, like Right. Regardless. The crazy thing that people don't know is that with pigs and chickens, the US biosecurity is way high. Like where you have to, I don't know what you have to do for chickens, but for pigs you, you often have to shower in and shower out. You have to Yep.

Christina Hudson [00:03:01] Go

Vance Crowe [00:03:01] Through water baths, all those kinds of things. So it's no simple thing to get into the pig barns. Is it true with chickens as

Christina Hudson [00:03:08] Well? Right, so like they change their clothes. They have barn shoes only that they leave in those buildings. So like when our employees come into the egg processing room, they were already stepping into a foot bath for their shoes to be sanitized. Typically they have shoes that they only wear on the farm that they leave in the break room. And so we already have like a hand washing station right by the door when you enter and hand sanitizer as well. So those stations were already, those three things were already already in place. So,

Vance Crowe [00:03:39] And so then you are at the processing part of eggs, which means they, the chickens lay, do they lay one egg a day? Do they lay two eggs a day? How does all this work?

Christina Hudson [00:03:49] So a chicken lays an egg on average about every one, every 26 hours or so, give or take process could take up to 30 hours and be as short, under 24 hours. But typically on average we say in a chicken lays an egg every 26 hours

Vance Crowe [00:04:03] And a chicken is gonna lay an egg regardless of whether it's been fertilized or not. And the, and the question is the, when you start having chicks, it's when you start exposing the chicken to the roosters. Is this right? Am I getting all

Christina Hudson [00:04:15] These terms right? That's correct. Yep, yep, yep. So we, we don't have any roosters on our farm. So our customers don't have to worry about getting any fertilized eggs. Sometimes if they get like a blood spot or something in their egg that has missed the blood detector, that's some technology that we have on the farm. Every egg goes through a blood detector before it ends up in the carton. So, but sometimes they might, technology fails so they think, oh no I have, I have a fertilized egg here. And they'll call and we'll say, what did you find? And we've actually had a lot more phone calls on the farm asking how fresh are my eggs? And then I asked them to pull the carton out if they have it still available and to look for that Julian date. Today's the hundred and 33rd day of the year. Unfortunately 2020 is a leap year as well. So we have 366 days of this instead of 365. I jokingly like to make a joke about during the pandemic it's gonna be longer than other years, but yeah, so they'll call and they'll say, how fresh are my eggs? And we had a gentleman call and they were processed two days before Thanksgiving and he still had them in his refrigerator and he was like, I've heard you can put 'em in water and if they float or they sink, I can tell if they're still fresh. And I was like, sir, it would be in your best interest to chuck those in the trash and get some fresh ones.

Vance Crowe [00:05:44] And is that true about the floating or sinking? Because I have always used that and probably eaten eggs that were suspect because of it.

Christina Hudson [00:05:51] I, I mean I've heard of it, I've never personally tried it.

Vance Crowe [00:05:55] I guess when you live on an egg farm you don't have to

Christina Hudson [00:05:57] Try these

Vance Crowe [00:05:57] Kinds of things.

Christina Hudson [00:05:59] We've always, like growing up my mom, my dad would bring home the cracked eggs and we'd always use like bee quality eggs at home. I mean they're still good there, there's nothing wrong with 'em. It's just a customer. The consumer doesn't wanna see that.

Vance Crowe [00:06:13] And so how many eggs are being produced at your farm every day?

Christina Hudson [00:06:17] So we have 250,000 lane hens. Before this pandemic started, we had two barns that had moved out and so we were actually in lower production than normal, which work to our benefit. So right now those chickens have, we have chickens that have moved back in and they are learning how to lay right now. So we have a lot of small eggs, the peewees and

Vance Crowe [00:06:43] What does that mean? Learning how to lay eggs.

Christina Hudson [00:06:46] So when they come, when they move into our barns, they're about 16, 17 weeks old and they're gonna adjust from the pull house where they were raised. We subcontract that out, we're able to go check on the chicks regularly, we make their pull feed on from our mill and we ship it to our chicks. And so my cousin Chris, he's one of the partners on the farm with my dad and my uncle, he's able to go work with the growers, check in on their health so we know what's going on from the day they're hatched all the way up to the time they move. And so we have an outside trucking outfit that will move our pulls from the Pul house to our facility here in central New York.

Vance Crowe [00:07:35] And the pull house is because they are fertilizing eggs. So you want the roosters over there and then you have the non No.

Christina Hudson [00:07:42] Oh no, they, they, they come and they are, they are, they're most likely they can tell. And so we just have mostly the females.

Vance Crowe [00:07:54] Okay. And so, so tell me when Coronavirus hit, you had restaurants and some grocery stores that were taking your eggs. Yep. But now the restaurants are shut down or they started getting shut down. How did this impact you? How did it roll out to you?

Christina Hudson [00:08:09] So one of our largest distributors, they're here on the east coast and they, they go from like Maine to Florida and their restaurant, all their restaurant business went from roll and roll and roll into nothing. So we quickly had to figure out, you know, where we could sell our eggs that weren't food service and distribution. And we have a great relationship with Linsky, which they are based out of Connecticut and they sell eggs into Massachusetts and they started to order an extra tractor trailer load of carton eggs a week from us. And they basically kept us afloat for

Vance Crowe [00:08:57] Wow.

Christina Hudson [00:08:58] Yeah, because there was some times where we didn't know what we were gonna run and we had to put 'em in these tic tiktoks or tic-tac, you stack 'em up on boards on a pallet with like, it looks like a tic-tac toe board. That's why you call 'em Tic-Tacs. And they just support the eggs and it's like an open pallet. Then once they've cooled down, you can wrap 'em up and then you wait for an order to come in and then you reprocess them or repackage them. So you could take 'em from the tic-tacs and put 'em in boxes and ship 'em out that way.

Vance Crowe [00:09:34] So I would imagine at the 250,000 chickens you said that are laying eggs. Yeah. So like that's gotta be a huge amount of food that you're bringing in every single day for these chickens to be able to eat, to turn into eggs. What, what's goes on with that?

Christina Hudson [00:09:49] So we have our own mill, my cousin Chris, he runs that. And so we have trucks of corn, soybean meat, meal coming in on a regular basis. So because we don't crop any of our own crops, we lease out our land. So that allows us to focus solely on producing eggs and the health of our tens. So yeah, that, that keeps my cousin pretty busy. Each age group of birds gets a different diet. So it's not like, hey you've got 250,000 chickens and they're all eating the same thing. So different ages require different, so maybe some more calcium when they're younger or when they're older or you know, he does all that. And my brother helps him calculate the pounds of feed and they, they use Excel. And when we make chicken feed, it's not by like a hundred pounds, we make it like 20 ton a feed at a time.

Vance Crowe [00:10:48] 20 tons of food

Christina Hudson [00:10:50] At a

Vance Crowe [00:10:50] Time. Yeah.

Christina Hudson [00:10:50] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:10:52] Wow.

Christina Hudson [00:10:52] And then we're able to blow that chicken feed from our mill to the different barns.

Vance Crowe [00:10:58] What do you mean blow it from the barns?

Christina Hudson [00:11:00] So it's like a pressure system and like you, like, you know, like when you are at the bank and you have like a, a direct deposit and you're like outside in your car and you shoot it through the tube, you know, and

Vance Crowe [00:11:14] Yeah.

Christina Hudson [00:11:14] Well that's, that's what we do with the chicken feed. We, we can make it in our mill and we can blow it right out into the barns. So like you can say, Hey, I'm gonna make this batch of feed, we have four barns so and we're gonna send it out to three B and so you can send it out to three B and sometimes you might make a little too much chicken feed and you go outside. And during the pandemic we had at the beginning of it, like if things didn't seem bad enough, we had one of the cones that seemed to like blow. It burst and we had chicken feed blowing across the roof of the barn, like out, out into like our driveway and like we're already inside after this has happened. And we had employees that were walking in and you know, they don't see chicken feet every day either because they're not out with the birds. And so one of them just thought it was sawdust so they didn't say anything. And we actually had one of our USDA egg inspectors on site when he strolled in, he was like, Hey Christina, you know, you, you got chicken feed out in your, your parking lot. I was like, what? And I went outside and I got on my radio. 'cause we all wear radios to communicate with each other. It's the easiest way to find each other. Sometimes we don't have cell service when we're, when my brother's out in the barn or my cousin's out in the barn or if he's scooping out chicken manure in the back. So we all wear radios to communicate. And so I got on my radio and then grabbed my cell phone and because I couldn't get ahold of my cousin and I called him on his cell phone and he was like, okay, we'll take care of it.

Christina Hudson [00:12:51] And our,

Vance Crowe [00:12:52] So once the, once the feed is blown into these barns, is there a person going around and scooping it into individual chickens?

Christina Hudson [00:12:58] Nope. There's like a whole belt system that that feeds those chickens and runs it out. And then we have people out in the barns that makes sure that they're getting fed on their schedule and that they have food available. Or if a bin's getting low they'll communicate, Hey, you know, we're ready to to to fill that bin. So, but yeah, it's all automated so.

Vance Crowe [00:13:21] So you are living in New York state and the news is telling us that New York City is real, real bad. How does it feel to be living outside of New York City right now?

Christina Hudson [00:13:33] So we're about what, four, four and a half hours from New York City and that was where a lot of our food service eggs went too. And we have friends that live in the city or we have, you know, people that would travel to the city often to visit family or go to shows or just, you know, New York is a fun place to visit. So you know, we're in upstate or central New York and so it's kind of like two worlds. But we were told that as a state we were going to reopen together. That has now changed and we're going into a four phase system and you have to meet seven different criteria to enter phase one, which would be this Friday. And it requires that we do so much testing per a hundred thousand people and all and hospital visits and stays are declining on a regular trend. And so it's certain regions of New York will be opening, when I say opening, it's not really opening 'cause it'll just be construction, some curbside retail pickup and some other things. But we did in our area have odd even shopping days based on birth year. So like, I was born in an odd year so I could go shopping on Monday, Wednesday or Friday.

Christina Hudson [00:15:04] Well it was advised that you go shopping on your, the year that you were born and we could go to public parks on those days and that that has subsided and we're able to go on any day now. And it wasn't like mandatory, it was just they were trying to reduce the number of people that were out and about, but that was, that was something that was different.

Vance Crowe [00:15:27] Yeah, it does seem like our systems have have picked up in some dramatic way. Right, right before we spoke I was like, all right, I gotta quick get in and get my groceries ordered so that that way I can get 'em a week from now. And I got all the way to the delivery section and they were like, do you want them in two hours or do you want them in the next few days? And I was like, whoa. Yeah,

Christina Hudson [00:15:45] Now

Vance Crowe [00:15:45] We're back to like normal land where things have caught up, which is a lot more comfortable.

Christina Hudson [00:15:50] Right. So, so I'm hoping that we'll be able to be in the phase one with the rest of the region, the Finger Lakes region and some of the southern tier. But you know, being located in central New York, people from New York City had easy access to their camps in the Finger Lakes in the Adirondacks. So the Adirondacks is pretty slow in in March and all of a sudden we had one of our suppliers that supplies eggs to Old Forge and he was like, it's summer traffic in March. And none of, they weren't prepared. The grocery store was just used to the amount of people that were locals. And then some of the other issues were the, some of the ambulance rides from like racket lake and stuff would be like two hours to like the nearest hospital. So as you have people flocking from New York City, you know, there was a lot of the locals were definitely in fear of people that were coming to their summer homes and different things. Was

Vance Crowe [00:16:56] There animosity there? Did people dislike the people coming from New York?

Christina Hudson [00:16:59] I don't think there was any animosity. I think there was just more concern that they would bring the virus to an area that had already been isolated and that they wouldn't have had it previously. Numbers have been very low up there in that region, I would say. So

Vance Crowe [00:17:15] Yeah, it's, it strikes me that people in the animal ag world have a view about herd immunity, about sickness, about quarantining when, I mean, you know what it is to at least have this kind of quarantine away from your chickens like we were talking about before. Right. What do you think about the efforts to quarantine and the way that people did social distancing based on what you know about keeping chickens alive inside of barns?

Christina Hudson [00:17:44] Right. So like I, I understand that like diseases can spread really easily. You know, we were talking earlier about like how I don't see the chickens, but like I have to be really careful about going to the park that has geese or I can't go to the local duck pond and feed the ducks. Like that's something like that I'm already used to avoiding. So it makes sense that if you have something that could, you could breathe in and then exhale on someone else. Like that's one thing with avian influenza, like you have to worry about blowing your nose. There's like the FDA and USDA, like they have so many guidelines if you've been exposed to birds, like I think I'm supposed to blow my nose like 12 times or something silly like that and shower if I've been exposed to birds. So like, I guess there's already so many rules that affect my life because of being raised around chickens. Like, it's like, okay, what's, you know, that's one more thing I guess, you know, my husband, he has asthma so like I'm definitely like, he's working from home. He works for the county government, so he works in the finance office and works on the budget. So like definitely know there's gonna be some strains here locally.

Vance Crowe [00:19:07] Yeah, that's, that's one of those things I think people are really unprepared for. I talked to a guy that sells or used to sell municipal bonds. So if a, if a city government doesn't have enough money or they wanna build a new park, they can go out and sell bonds. And it would appear to me that a lot of city governments are gonna have way big shortfalls and they're not like the federal government where they can just be like, all right, well let's just print some more money. The money has to come from somewhere.

Christina Hudson [00:19:29] We're dependent on sales tax to run our county government pay salary. Like they're so last, the first quarter we were 30% short on sales tax. So, and that was just with two weeks of, you know, things, you know, you have to think people were amping up and shopping like crazy in the beginning of March and then with two weeks of just dropping off, we were short 30%.

Vance Crowe [00:19:54] So you also, if I understand correctly, you got married not that long before Coronavirus, right?

Christina Hudson [00:20:00] Yeah, back in September. So the end of September, September 28th. And so we were planning on going on our honeymoon, you know, and well we like to travel in the month of May, so we had plans to go to New Orleans in the beginning of May for like 10 days and we were gonna do stay Alfred it and do some day trips and different things like that. And obviously we were hyper aware that things were shutting down and then we were fearful if things opened up too soon, we would be like required to still, like we might lose out on money if we didn't feel comfortable traveling. But luckily for us things are still shut down. So we were able to get our flights changed for future trips and then we'll get a refund for where we were gonna stay because Stay Alfred has closed down for two months.

Vance Crowe [00:20:54] How concerned are you about the disease itself or is it something that keeps you up at night? Are you worried?

Christina Hudson [00:21:00] It doesn't really keep me up at night, but I have had some weirder dreams and nor normal I like, I, I definitely have, I think the stress on the farm. Like I have some really weird like egg processing related dreams and my dad's like, I hope they never come true. 'cause of course I go to work the next day and I'm like, I dream that the dirty return was on the ground and then like it's suspended up in the air. So that would be like terrible. It'd be awful if that happened. Or different things. Like I've had dreams where like we couldn't process the eggs fast enough and they were just all going everywhere. So I think,

Vance Crowe [00:21:31] Have I got a book for you? I have got a book for you you should read and maybe we'll read it for the book club next month. This month we're reading Logan's Run, right?

Christina Hudson [00:21:40] But

Vance Crowe [00:21:41] Next month I think what we're gonna do is is read Carl Young's the undiscovered self.

Christina Hudson [00:21:46] Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:21:46] Where in there he starts talking about dreams and what do they mean and what is the unconscious mind. And all of a sudden you start being like, you wake up and you're like, I gotta write that down because I need to know what I was thinking there. What is my unconscious brain trying to tell me?

Christina Hudson [00:22:00] You're right. So definitely, so yeah, it's just being a newlywed and you know, you're ex you're ex excited to do all these things together. So one thing that we have had time to do that we wouldn't have had time to do is like build shelves in the garage, but like learning how to build some, like when you date, like you don't build anything really together. So it's like following instructions together, like I wanna read them and it's like, oh, he's like, yeah, I'll let you read 'em. So it's just like to make things go as smooth as possible. But you know, we have a lot of fun things to do in the central New York region. We have the great New York State Fair that this summer will most likely be canceled. We are lifetime season well pass holders. They only had like 200 of them. So we have these coins with our names engraved on 'em and wow,

Vance Crowe [00:22:53] That's hardcore. What did you have to do to get that

Christina Hudson [00:22:56] Sign up at six o'clock in the morning? And luckily I was working at the farm, so I was already at work at 5 45 so being on the computer to sign up at 6:00 AM was no big deal. But it did sell out in three minutes, 200 lifetime passes for $200.

Vance Crowe [00:23:11] Wow.

Christina Hudson [00:23:12] So we, yeah, but we have an amphitheater, we can walk to it from our house and they have some big acts like Dave Matthews and other things with a lot of country singers come and obviously

Vance Crowe [00:23:26] That's all changed,

Christina Hudson [00:23:27] That's all changed. The other thing we, so we can access the, the, the county trails right from our house. It's like a mile walk and we cross the highway and, but they have been swamped. So normally this time of year if you went out on the trail, you'd have the place kind of yourself. It's a little cold. It's abnormally cold in New York right now. We had snow this past weekend. We had a nor'easter actually. But like the parks, there's a lot of bikers, a lot of walkers, joggers, so there's lots of people out that normally wouldn't be out or at like Beaver Lake, which is right down the road as well. They've had to close the parking lot because they have too many people there. And so like, you know, they have park police. So

Vance Crowe [00:24:13] In St. Louis, what they're talking about doing is opening back up, starting on Monday. And one of the things that they wanna require are masks. And I talk with people about this and they're like, Hey, this is great. We know that we can lower transmission if we mandate that people wear masks. And I have a whole like libertarian streak in me that's very, very against that. But I was talking with a good friend of mine and we started talking about the, the thing that makes me really push back against masks more than just the mandate, which is most of the signals that we get from another human being is our ability to read what's going on on their face. And so I, I mean I'm, I really don't know where I stand on this. I'm very interested to hear your point of view, but my sense is we have a few million years of evolution, particularly among women being able to look at a person that's coming towards them and start making decisions before it's a problem based on how do they look, what, what, what sense am I getting for them? And if we cover everyone's front of their faces so that the only their eyes can be seen, to me this is a real danger that people are not talking about. What do you think as a woman, what do you think of that?

Christina Hudson [00:25:26] Well, yeah, it's one thing like sometimes when you see someone and you wanna acknowledge them, you might smile at them to be like, okay, like you know, I accept that like, you know, this is okay interaction and I found myself smiling at people that are getting close to me at the store or whatever and then I realized they can't see me smiling or different things, you know, at the park. That's because I don't really interact. So I see my employees at work but other than that we've changed our grocery shopping habits and everything. But like at the park a lot of people aren't running or biking with masks. You might see 'em down below their chin and then if you get too close and you could pick it up. But it's interesting, people don't typically say hi or if you do wave at them and say hi, they're like, why are you talking to me? Like, you know, like that's abnormal. 'cause normally I, I went to an environmental school so like happy trails like, you know, say hi to everyone on the trail. Right. And they're so some people they do like they're excited to see a human and then others are like, you know,

Vance Crowe [00:26:31] Yeah I like, I'm really, really uncomfortable. I think I, I think for me like since I'm a communications person, like so much of my brain processing power as temple gran would say is focused on like, what is this other person thinking? How are they reacting? How are they responding? Yeah. And I think, and I could be wrong about this, but I think there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of cues that I can read on your face that I can't identify but they tell me danger or Right.

Christina Hudson [00:26:59] Ah,

Vance Crowe [00:26:59] I get uncomfortable

Christina Hudson [00:27:00] And especially at work working with employees that are wearing masks, you know, it's hard if they're trying to communicate to the other side of the egg grader that they've got an issue with their packer or they need ink added to the data and Oh, people

Vance Crowe [00:27:16] At your work wear masks all the time?

Christina Hudson [00:27:18] Yeah, well I mean most of the time if you're closer than six feet, like they recommended that you could take some of your processing lines down to keep people further away from each other. But we've already outgrown our e our current egg packaging facility. So I mean there's only 10 of us that are typically processing eggs on while we're running and washing and drying the eggs and sizing them and everything. But that's all done automatically. So some people are really spaced out, like my cooler guy, he hangs out in the cooler most of the time by himself unless like one of our truck drivers comes back, our truck drivers are wearing masks. I did bring down like a bottle of hand sanitizer that we like gave out to our truck drivers to have in their trucks 'cause they are still doing some store door deliveries and we have a variety of masks. They all have chickens on them but like some of them don't like tho that material. So they might bring in their own disposable mask or different things or a style that they like. But employers have to provide them in New York state to essential workers.

Vance Crowe [00:28:33] Are employers considered liable if, if somebody comes into your work and gets sick are if with Coronavirus, are you then liable for it? Do you know?

Christina Hudson [00:28:42] I am. I'm not too sure. We have like mandatory sick pay that's related to COVID and we work with New York Farm Bureau. They've been, originally they were sending out a daily e email with like the changes in HR or health and safety so that we as farmers could keep up with all those rapid changes and they did a great job and now it's just a Monday, Wednesday and Friday email that comes out from the communications department at New York Farm Bureau. But they, they helped us a lot because you hear our governor on his daily teleconference saying, you know, in two days all employers are gonna have to provide masks and you can't find 'em at the store. So one of my good friends, Eileen Jensen, she sewed me a bunch of chicken masks and then one day I drove down to the Finger Lakes and pick them up socially distancing and saw the baby lambs and goats and different things like that. But

Vance Crowe [00:29:50] I think that those networks that farmers have a lot of people living in the city don't have. So, so for people that are living in the city, they don't understand how the Farm Bureau works. The Farm Bureau is for farmers who are normally way decentralized throughout the state to say, Hey, we have some common interests. Either we own land together and we wanna make sure it's, we're able to pool our resources, we have problems we wanna figure out. Like the last time I was at the New York Farm Bureau, they were like, are we gonna grow hemp or not? How do we feel about marijuana? And they get together and they argue things out. But that, that ends up allowing having a safety net that I don't think most people in the city have because I've been contacting, like I spoke with Julie Murphy from Arizona Farm Bureau, the New York Farm Bureau, Illinois Farm Bureau. Like they are hitting it because they know this is the news that matters to our people. And I think like most people are just getting the news that's set up for a national audience. It's not really for you. And I think that, I hope other people realize, man I really wish I would've had a community that I was already connected with before this thing happened. Yeah

Christina Hudson [00:30:51] And AG and New York state is so diverse and people don't really think of New York state as an ag state at all, but we've got, we've got cows, we have chickens and we have apples, lots of apples and maple syrup is a big thing here. So like Maple Weekend was all canceled. So, but watching those producers of Maple transition to doing more like online sales are like, you can even host a party and sell maple products and then the host earns rewards that are maple product. That's something,

Vance Crowe [00:31:23] Well our maple syrup has shot through the roof, how much we use because we now have Sunday morning pancakes and so I have my New York Farm Bureau syrup, but like it's gotta be changing for them. I hope they're leveraging it that there are so many people now having brunch when they didn't use to.

Christina Hudson [00:31:40] Right. So and using those eggs that they didn't use to

Vance Crowe [00:31:43] Yeah, that's right.

Christina Hudson [00:31:44] There's a lot of, there's a lot of great ways you can use eggs, qui pudding, make homemade pudding, different things like that. So

Vance Crowe [00:31:52] You've taught me some interesting things about eggs, like how long they last for and what happens when you wash them and can you freeze them. What are things that you know about eggs that other people don't know?

Christina Hudson [00:32:03] Well it was really funny. One of my friends, she said, you know, I've been eating a lot of egg whites because I'm doing noom and I'm working on losing weight, but now I have these yolks, how long can I keep the yolks before I, you know, need to throw them out? And you know, I didn't know the answer but I was like, you know what, the American Egg Board has a free resource called the egg encyclopedia. It's like 94 pages long, but it is like a wealth of knowledge. So like if you ever have any egg related questions and you don't know your friendly egg farmer, you could re go to the American Egg Board website and check out the egg encyclopedia. But yeah, so like today we had A-U-S-D-A inspector there, so those eggs had to have a 45 day juliann date code on them. So like the best if used by, so that would be June 26th is 45 days away. So the, all those eggs and when the inspector's there, he's just checking to make sure that our, like our egg wash temperature is up to the, the range it's supposed to be and that the rinse water is at the temperature it's supposed to be at and we use like a, a chlorine spray, it has to be between a hundred to 200 parts per million. And so he's checking to make sure that that that sanitation spray on, you know, is in the,

Vance Crowe [00:33:27] Is that a pretty boring job? I would imagine that most of the safety protocols that a major farm like yours has are pretty sasan.

Christina Hudson [00:33:35] He loves coming to our farm because he's like eggs, there's not much you can do for, for grading. Like it's either cracked, it's a check, it's a grade B and then he weighs 'em so he hangs out and and

Vance Crowe [00:33:49] So that's what grade A eggs are, no, no cracks.

Christina Hudson [00:33:52] Yep. And then there's certain like he'll, he'll candle them individually to, to look for imperfections and different things.

Vance Crowe [00:34:01] What's candling?

Christina Hudson [00:34:02] So candling they would have like a light source years ago that like would go, I'm looking down like I'm candling eggs, but so there would be like a light box and the eggs would roll over it and prior to the days of a blood detector and a crack detector, the light would light up the egg and you could see the cracks in the shells that might not be visible to the naked eye or you could see that there was like a meat spot or a blood spot in the egg and so you would throw it into a bucket

Vance Crowe [00:34:36] And then now computers like you have an automated system that does it for you.

Christina Hudson [00:34:41] Yep. So we have a dirty detector that looks at, it takes two cameras and they kinda look at each other like this and the egg would be in the center and as the eggs roll by the dirty detector says, oh that one's a dirty one. And it'll send it back to go through the wash again all by itself or it'll go over. So after the dirty detector there's a crack detector and it just rolls over these pins and if it's a crack it'll send it to the crack line and then the blood detector, it like flashes every egg like the candling would, but it just flashes and it'll look for a shadow.

Vance Crowe [00:35:15] And what happens if you have a crack in an egg? What do you guys do with one of those eggs?

Christina Hudson [00:35:19] So the cracks go to its own packer and we send them to tailor egg up in New Hampshire and they further process them. So they go on these plastic trays and

Vance Crowe [00:35:35] Oh interesting. So it's not like, hey we got a cracked egg that we just throw 'em out the back over there and then and then throw 'em in compost. You're actually putting them into production.

Christina Hudson [00:35:42] We do some of that too. Some of the really bad cracked eggs, they go into these big fi or red like big red buckets and we take 'em out to the bobcat and then they get mixed in with the, the egg, the chicken manure. So for further like composting.

Vance Crowe [00:36:01] So you know, you've talked about your family and your family business and you think about the fact that you probably grew up around the town that you're in now, right?

Christina Hudson [00:36:10] Yeah, so our original farm was in Camillas, New York. We used to have a farm store 30 years ago. My parents actually met because my mom worked at the mill that sold the flour and pancake mix that was sold at our, at our farm store. And so like New Hope Mills at the south end of Skinny Atlas Lake and the Finger Lakes is like important to our family. We actually still sell eggs to New Hope Mills. They still produce pancake mix in Auburn, New York and they shipped flour and pancake mix in yeast. I know a lot of people were having trouble finding flour in yeast at the grocery store because there was increase in baking. So new home mills, they will ship to you your pancakes and if you want

Vance Crowe [00:36:58] Oh is that how they do instant pancake mix? Is that it's dehydrated eggs that they put into the, into the batter?

Christina Hudson [00:37:05] Well they don't get the eggs from us for that, but they sell eggs in the, in their like little, their little kitchen. Interesting farm store. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah they have, that's why you, so what I was gonna

Vance Crowe [00:37:18] Ask about growing up in your town is, you know, a lot of people their dream, particularly if you're just out, you know you're four hours from New York City is like, I can't wait to get the hell outta here and I'm gonna go to New York where people recognize that I'm great, you know, but you, you didn't do that right? So did you always know that you were going to be on this chicken farm or, or how did this work out?

Christina Hudson [00:37:39] Okay, so I always said I was never gonna work on the family farm growing up. I packaged eggs on snow days and different things when that was like, you know, your kids could work on the farm nowadays, you know, they don't as often because of liability and different things like that. But so yeah, snow day and wasn't watching cartoons. I didn't even know that someone was gonna call out because they didn't have childcare or something, which is totally acceptable normal. But as a kid you didn't understand that and I have to go pack eggs or candle eggs or whatever. So I went to SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. I have a degree in environmental studies, policy planning, man

Vance Crowe [00:38:22] An ag, this is like the, the opposite. You went to, you went over to the enemy for most of addict environmental science.

Christina Hudson [00:38:30] Yeah, no. So I went to environmental because I, growing up in Farm Bureau, you know, know policy was everything. So I was like, I'm gonna get a policy degree, I'm gonna go to Washington DC I'm gonna write policy by the end of my degree I hated alphabet soup of the EPA and everything else and FDA and USDA and all that. I was just like, I'm not going to DC no. Like I'll go visit and see the monuments and everything else and go to the Smithsonian, that's great. But I was like, nope, I'm gonna take a break from all of this. And I actually went and worked at an alarm monitoring company and I did all their, like I ended up doing like data analysis on accounts. So I would call chicken farms in the south and say you have a temperature alarm and or your system's malfunctioning and you have so many days to fix it or we're gonna turn your account off. And we monitored other accounts. So like when hurricanes would blow through, like it was guaranteed overtime even though I lived in New York state and I was safe from the hurricanes, I was, we had to work 12 hours a day and in a call center calling on, you know, letting people know that yeah your power's out. Well now that's changed and you can just get an automated call from the IVR and it'll, some recording will tell you that your power's out.

Vance Crowe [00:39:56] So how did you make that transition from the security company back to the family farm? Right,

Christina Hudson [00:40:00] So how did I make that? I was tethered to my phone at a security company and, and my computer and like the, everything would just automatically pop up and I was working at a cubicle and I was like, cubicle life is not for me. Like I cannot do this. Like there was 400 of us working in this office in downtown Syracuse. It was nice. Like my local coffee shop was right around the corner. I could go out in my lunch and walk the creek walk, go to Inner Harbor. I could make it to dinosaur barbecue in 10 minutes in my car, pick up takeout and come back to the office, eat my my dinner and go back to work. 'cause I was working three to 11 there. So after working three to 11, I was praying for a nine to five and someone had a sense of humor because I started working 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM

Vance Crowe [00:40:52] Ooh, that's a

Christina Hudson [00:40:53] Tough one. And that was tough. I did it for 17 weeks and then I ended up going to like, so yeah I just, you know, you can only be tethered to a phone and a computer for so long. And so I started working Saturdays on the farm. So I was working five days a week at the alarm monitoring center. And then on Saturdays I was test running to see if I wanted to be the new egg processing manager. My dad had an opening and he was really hoping that I would do it and you know, there's this time, so I've been doing that now for six years. I did it for three months working on Saturdays. And then six years ago on Valentine's Day I walked into my manager's office and I put in my two week notice and he didn't see it coming at all and I was like, I love myself enough to walk away from this job. And so it's not been smooth sailing, you know, transitioning, working with family has its own fun, you know, levels that yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:41:50] No matter how close you are, you have all the layers of personality and, and like I remember this thing that you did to me on the vacation of 89 and and I'm gonna hold that against you as we have problems with the feed machine,

Christina Hudson [00:42:04] Right? So also like being fourth generation on a family farm, we're going through transition planning, we're trying to figure out like you might hear 250,000 chickens and you think wow, that's a lot of chickens. And I am here to tell you that we are small in the grand scheme of egg production in the us Like New York state doesn't even like make the top 10 egg producers.

Vance Crowe [00:42:28] What's a, what's considered a big farm?

Christina Hudson [00:42:30] I mean to me it's like a million birds.

Vance Crowe [00:42:33] Okay.

Christina Hudson [00:42:34] Yeah. And we've got a couple of those in New York state, but like, it's nothing like in the Midwest or Arizona, different things like that. So, or down in Pennsylvania they've got some big farms too where they've got like 9 million birds and so that, I mean that seems like a lot of eggs to me knowing that they lay one every 26 hours.

Vance Crowe [00:42:55] Yeah, I mean it's, it's you're, I didn't ever know that you could calculate that out. So if somebody knew how many chickens you had, you could basically say every 24 hours you're cranking out about. Yeah.

Christina Hudson [00:43:03] So like, so today we did about like 19,000 dozen is what we did today.

Vance Crowe [00:43:10] And so the last question that I wanted to ask you about with your farm, you guys had some carton issues. I remember like we were talking one day and you were like, yeah, we thought we were gonna get cartons and we didn't like what, like what all is going on with that and has it resolved?

Christina Hudson [00:43:25] It's gotten worse since we last talked about cartons. So we prior to the pandemic ordered our normal egg cartons and they were supposed to be here, let's see, it's now May, they were supposed to be here in the beginning of April and it is now, you know, May 12th here. And they are just running our cartons now. They ran some of them last night and we're hoping and praying that they finish running them.

Vance Crowe [00:44:03] How do you store eggs if you can't put them in cartons

Christina Hudson [00:44:06] On flats or we have started like calling customers and saying, Hey, we don't have your private label available. Would it be possible if we send them out in someone else's egg cartons? And you know, they obviously wanna have eggs to sell at the store, so they're saying yes or we have a stock curtain and I've gotten really good with the label maker and making barcodes and so we've been sticking to a label on these like stock cartons that just say like grade a extra large and then we sticker a sticker says Hudson Farm Fresh or something like that on it.

Vance Crowe [00:44:42] And these are just the, the carton of 12 eggs. That's what you're waiting on to get 12 or

Christina Hudson [00:44:47] 18? Yeah, 12 or 18 pack. So yeah, we're, we're out of burned dairy, we're out of a lot of our Hudson label. Yeah. And as you start to use other people's cartons then you're, you're so the one there is a silver lining when these new cartons come in, we won't really have to rotate anything in our warehouse because there won't be anything to rotate that's, but yeah, so, but the egg packaging facility that makes our cart cartons is in Georgia and they do have some employees that have been out due to the out due to the pandemic. So they're having a staffing issue that in addition to the increase of everyone wants egg cartons because they're not selling to food service. So my dad, when I was like telling him that I was gonna do this podcast with you, he was like, tell him we need our food service back. You know, like we need the restaurants to open up. Like we don't want people getting sick, we want everyone to stay healthy. But you know, Easter would've been a really big weekend for going out for brunch or out to eat mother's day. So, you know, people didn't take their mom out for brunch. Well

Vance Crowe [00:46:04] I think of all those talks and conventions that people have where they're making huge mountains of eggs for, for buffets and they're just not happening right now.

Christina Hudson [00:46:12] Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's been, it's been a wild time, but I don't think I would wanna be in any other industry right now than ag because we, like you were talking about that network, it's like, okay, well I know I can get this or I know this is gonna be coming in in in season here locally or you know, you pick operations are gonna have to make some changes. We have like a lot of you pick strawberries and you, you pick blueberries and raspberries and things like that. So,

Vance Crowe [00:46:45] So final question. Yes. What do you think the world will look like in two weeks?

Christina Hudson [00:46:51] What will the world look like in two weeks? I think that we'll definitely as things reopen probably see spikes in numbers for COVID, but I think that we also have better access to testing so that you might see more cases, but that's just because we have more testing or like here in central New York we're required to test so many people. I think we have to do at least 600 tests a day. So they're asking you if you're feeling sick or not, go get tested for COVID so that we can hit those stats. And we definitely have had the conversation at home like, oh, should we just go get tested to see it? And I was like, I don't think I really wanna get swabbed if I don't have to get swabbed. Like I come home from work and I take my temperature like before I did this podcast with you, I took my temperature when I wake up in the morning before I go to the farm, I take my temperature. So that way I have been tracking it so that way if it does spike, I'm catching it as soon as possible. So I I'm hoping that we have a lot of positive news here in the next couple of weeks. I'm gonna be optimistic.

Vance Crowe [00:48:03] Well I think that's a fair thing. I think there's been a lot of cause for optimism. I think things have started to hook back up. I know I was very concerned about pork plants for a while and I heard that a hundred percent of them are running, they're not all running at a hundred percent capacity, but they're all back up.

Christina Hudson [00:48:17] Well that'd be good because we need meat meal to make our chicken feed. And with pork plants being closed, everyone was wondering what, what, how they were gonna fill that nutritional need in their diets without, without that byproduct available.

Vance Crowe [00:48:32] Oh wow. You don't even think about, I mean and that's why shutting down the economy, like, you know, I was having a conversation with somebody last night about like, there's so much we don't know about the disease and their position was since there's so much we should keep the economy shut down and keep people locked in. And I was like, we're talking about the most sophisticated economy in the world and we've shut it down. And so like we really don't know what's gonna happen when you start throwing wrenches into this system. Right. 'cause like

Christina Hudson [00:48:59] How would

Vance Crowe [00:48:59] You know that chickens maybe can't get fed or can't get fed as healthy of a diet if you knock off pork production?

Christina Hudson [00:49:05] Pork? Yeah. So, and mental health would be another issue that, you know, that I'm really concerned about for not only for farmers but for, you know, the average citizen during this, how their mental health will be affected from isolation. We're very social people, you know? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:49:23] And I think like, you know, we wanna protect the nursing homes and the people that are very vulnerable there, but we don't wanna get to the point where we say we can't take any risk. We don't want them to be exposed to anything at all ever. Because how would it be to live as an older person and then knowing like, hey, once you get over 70 you're just not allowed into society anymore. People won't come visit you. Like

Christina Hudson [00:49:46] I

Vance Crowe [00:49:46] Know we have to

Christina Hudson [00:49:47] Be safe. I know I poor grandma is like, she's pretty tech savvy with FaceTime and Facebook and staying in touch with all the grandchildren 'cause we're all spread out around the country and different things. But I know she was saying like she's 91, she was saying that she is like losing her, her motivation like her will 'cause like no one can come visit her and so she's getting like quite lonely. So we did do a parade and wave to her the other day on Mother's Day and different things. But

Vance Crowe [00:50:16] You really gotta take care of that stuff. I mean there's a reason grandmas make cookies with grandchildren, right? It's that touch, it's that presence. It's that being around and our fear of the, of dying from the disease is a real thing. Right? But it shouldn't supersede everything because we'll have a society where everybody's wearing masks so you don't know who you can trust and there's a whole bunch of people you can't visit and maybe it's just for a short time, but we wanna be careful what we get used to, I think. Yeah.

Christina Hudson [00:50:42] So thanks for having me on Vance and I look forward to following Coronavirus through your lens. It's been a wide variety of people and so it's nice to just have that, that variety and book club has been something I've looked forward to.

Vance Crowe [00:50:57] Well, I'm glad you've been there.

Christina Hudson [00:50:59] So

Vance Crowe [00:50:59] Thanks for, thanks for coming on. You know, you have a, a, a window into a world that is so ordinary that it's like water. People are like, oh, those eggs are just always there. But it's really complicated and so thanks for jumping on and talking about it.

Christina Hudson [00:51:12] Okay, thanks.