Seng Choon Farm has turned to automation to a large extent, and CNA Insider has an exclusive insight into some things that Singaporeans don't know when they get eggs.

Seng Choon Farm produces 600,000 eggs from its 850,000 hens every day.

Singapore: Retail prices have increased recently. Malaysia may restrict its export of eggs. But the general manager of this local egg farm did not stop worrying.

Mr. Koh Yeow Koon, 43, said that on the one hand, although the price of eggs is getting higher and higher, the price increase over the years has not kept up with the pace of overall inflation.

Seng Choon Farm is the largest egg farm in the Republic, meeting about 12% of the market demand here.

But Mr. Xu doubts whether his or any local farms can start to compete with Malaysian farms in terms of cost, which means that sales are restricted.

"Only a certain percentage of the market is willing to pay higher prices for fresher, higher-quality eggs produced by Singapore farms," ​​he said.

"I think the number of people willing to accept Singaporean eggs is only about 30%."

This figure is only slightly higher than their current consumption share of 27%. In 2017, 521 million eggs were produced locally.

Mr. Koh mentioned Singapore’s high land, labor, utilities, and compliance costs. But what worries him more is the "increasing competition from overseas farms that produce 1 to 2 million eggs per day."

His farm produces 600,000 eggs from 850,000 chickens every day. The overseas figures are important because "we are seeing more and more technology being used on large farms."

"For sustainability and survival, we need to continuously upgrade our technology," he explained. "So whether we like it or not, we have to participate in the competition. We have to adopt all this large-scale automation."

Technology and automation are factors in the revival of Singapore's agriculture. Since Seng Choon moved to 36 acres of farmland (27 football fields) in Lim Chu Kang in 2010, the situation has not been different.

But how can automation be used to provide Singaporeans with eggs every day? As CNA Insider discovered in an exclusive internal observation of Seng Choon Farm, there are several ways, big and small.

Watch: Inside Singapore's largest egg farm (5:34)

1. How the hens are fed

The farm’s feed mill prepares nearly 100 tons of specially formulated feed every day, and requires about a dozen jars of different sizes to store raw materials such as soybeans, corn and wheat.

Some materials such as corn are large, so they must be chopped in a hammer mill.

The core of the entire feed factory is the control room, where a computer weighs the required weight of each raw material to obtain the correct ratio of each feed.

"They will be mixed in a blender... to become the proper nutrition the chicken needs," Mr. Xu said.

Feed is sent to all the chicken coops via conveyor belts-this work used to be done manually and by trucks-and is then delivered to the hens through an automatic dispenser five times a day.

"This control room seems to be getting smaller and smaller, because over the years, we have been installing more equipment to reduce the labor involved," Mr. Xu added.

2. The feed determines the type of egg

Different chickens are given different feeds to produce a series of products, including carrot eggs and Omega-3 eggs rich in different vitamins and minerals.

"For example, if we feed chickens with fish oil or oil rich in Omega-3, they can deliver these lipids to the yolk," Mr. Xu said.

"We can get eggs with lower cholesterol content, or eggs with higher vitamin D content, and all of this is achieved through our experience in feed changes."

These special eggs are easy to sort by machine because they are packed at different times.

However, there are differences in the nutrients available in eggs, because chickens are "not a machine", and to some extent, this may also depend on the breed.

3. How to raise hens

The poultry house is completely enclosed, with four to six floors per floor, which can house 30,000 to 50,000 chickens. These are different from the past two-story open natural ventilation structure.

"Because it is closed, the temperature is better controlled," Mr. Xu said.

"So the outside temperature may be 33 or 34 degrees, but we can keep the temperature inside the house at 29 to 30°C by using evaporative cooling pads and controlled fans."

As the computer maintains a stable temperature range, "chickens are cooler and welfare is better." There are even cages with LEDs and dimmers that mimic natural light by slowly brightening during the day and dimming at dusk.

The manure is collected on a conveyor belt and transported to the central processing area for conversion into compost.

Importantly, as Singapore’s egg farmers do not allow antibiotics on their hens, enclosed chicken coops help ensure that there is no “interference from external factors that may spread the disease to the chickens”.

Staff and visitors need to be disinfected before entering the chicken house.

4. How to collect and grade eggs

The cage tilts slightly, and the eggs roll off the conveyor belt as they lay. Starting from the house, the conveyor belt leads to the egg collection center, where grading and sorting are carried out.

Before the state-of-the-art classifier performs quality control on 120,000 eggs per hour, eggs that are obviously broken or leaking are removed by hand.

The eggs pass through its series of cameras, and as each egg rolls along the conveyor belt, they will take 16 different photos of each egg. "If the eggs are dirty, they will be sent to different channels for different treatment," Mr. Xu said.

After the "egg inspector" is the "crack detector", which can even inspect fine lines and cracks that are invisible to the human eye. It achieves this through acoustic detection-measuring the sound of tapping (16 times) on an egg.

"Previously this was done by visual inspection. So what they would do is emit a very bright light. But after a while, people would feel so tired that they missed the cracks," he added.

The eggs are then sterilized by ultraviolet light on the surface of the eggshell, and then the final step of the individual weighing and grading process: the blood spot detector.

"Blood spots naturally appear in some eggs. This is a very small percentage...maybe 0.05%," Mr. Xu explained. "It's natural, but consumers just don't like to see it in their eggs."

The machine detects these eggs by emitting a very bright light and removes them. "But the machine is a machine, and 2% to 3% of the eggs may still be missed."

5. The significance of automation to manpower

After packaging, the eggs are placed in crates, and robotic arms move them from the conveyor belt and stack them into pallets for delivery.

"This used to be done manually by one or two people from morning till night," Mr. Xu said. "Every day, we have to change another person."

Faced with a labor shortage that is bound to get worse, management knows that automation is a must.

“Therefore, in the past 10 years, we have completed many automation projects related to various aspects of the farm,” added Koh Swee Lai, the youngest child of its chairman, Koh Swee Lai, who founded Seng Choon in 1987.

"In the office, we changed the IT system. Even in the delivery, we provided them with a personal digital assistant... They don't need to remember all the prices that change every week."

In fact, since the establishment of the farm, his father has traveled to the United States and Europe many times to learn new agricultural techniques. But only after Seng Choon moved, they could "design the farm around automation."

Egg production doubled to reach current production. "The benefit of all this automation is that we maintain a workforce of about 100 people," he said.

"Everyone knows each other, so this is a pretty good working environment with a large scale."

The scale of automation also means that now agriculture is becoming "more and more complex", but he has no doubt that Seng Choon must be at the forefront of technology adoption in order to maintain a low production cost curve.

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