Why shouldn’t you tell an egg a joke? Because you could crack it up. And cracks are certainly not what you want in an egg if you hope to sell it.

Apart from physical cracks, which is the most direct and obvious way that renders them unsellable, there are other factors affecting Malta’s egg production industry.

First, some numbers to give the sector perspective. According to EU data for April, there were 326,209 laying hens kept in ‘enriched’ cages in 22 farms across the Maltese islands, 80 free-range chickens on one production site and 9,919 housed in barns on six farms.

Land-locked Luxembourg – with a population of some 130,000 more people than Malta – had a total of 114,000 laying birds distributed among 15 farms.

Clearly, the Maltese like eggs! However, one reason why Luxembourg has so few laying chickens is that it can easily import what it needs from its neighbours. Not so Malta.

Eggs, mostly from Italy, are imported but we rely almost entirely on our local suppliers. “Maltese people prefer local eggs,” states Ballut Farm managing director Clive Vella, and it has little to do with national bias.

Local eggs are always fresher, he says. “If we pick them in the morning they can be in shops by the afternoon or the following day,” explains Vella. Not so with imported eggs.

Nevertheless, many of the big local producers are more concerned about foreign competition than domestic. Geography and costs are the principal reason for this.

As islands with no raw materials, Malta’s egg farmers are obliged to “import everything – the feed, the machinery, the cartons and plastic packs we sell our eggs in”, says Vella.

Not only that but more significantly, even the chicks are imported by some egg producers.

“We used to have a hatchery, but nowadays every four months we bring between 3,000 and 3,500 one-day-old chicks from Italy,” says Anthony Fenech, co-owner of St Anthony Farm in Qormi.

Ballut Farm also imported pullets from Italy but it now operates its own hatcheries – one in Żurrieq and another in the Chadwick Lakes area.

At 16 weeks the pullets are transferred to laying farms – to Mtarfa or Għajn Tuffieha in Ballut’s case, and from growing sheds to laying sheds in St Anthony’s.

A slight deviation from the narrative: chickens are known by a variety of names corresponding to their life stages. They are called chicks for the first six to eight weeks after hatching. Females are then known as pullets and males as cockerels.

The country may produce just 20 per cent of its food needs but it is self-sufficient in egg production

At about 16 to 20 weeks females begin to lay small eggs known as pullet eggs, as they grow older they produce larger ones. It’s not until they’re a year old and fully grown that they’re referred to as hens. An average hen lays between 300 and 325 eggs a year, and in Malta these are categorised as A, B or C and then weight graded. Grade A eggs come in four sizes – very large (XL) weighing from 73gms upwards, large from 63gms to 72gms, medium from 53gms to 62gms and small for eggs under 53gms.

Now back to the narrative.

The new arrivals at the laying farms – also known as production sites – replace hens that are deemed no longer ‘serviceable’, normally when they reach 16 to 18 months old.

Ballut Farm, the biggest in the country, has a laying flock of some 70,000 birds and every fourth month replaces between 15,000 and 20,000 hens. These produce about 40,000 eggs a day, that’s 14.6 million a year.

St Anthony Farm has 15,000 laying 12,000 eggs daily, or 4.32 million annually. Even smaller producers such as Baħrija’s Golden Yolk Farm with 9,000 hens has an annual ‘throughput’ of 2.7 million eggs.

Today the country produces an estimated 109 million eggs a year, not that many more from the 98 million of 10 years ago.

With this kind of output local producers ought not to fear foreign competition. But the bigger ones do.

Some also question why several large supermarkets, which buy up to 90,000 eggs a week from local suppliers, feel the need to stock foreign eggs as well.

The country may produce just 20 per cent of its food needs but it is self-sufficient in egg production. So why do egg farmers feel threatened?

All agree their overheads are high and profit margins small. They are also concerned at the growing volumes of imported egg products available in shops – bottles of egg white, ‘cracked and ready’ packs and tubs of pre-peeled hard-boiled eggs.

These convenience items are becoming increasingly popular at some pizzerias, for instance, which buy pre-peeled hard-boiled eggs, and pastry shops which just need the albumen (egg whites).

Up to now the local producers have not been able to compete with these ‘foreign novelties’. But one recently set up company has begun to make a dent in this sector.

Since January AGA Egg Products, a division of St Anthony Farm, has been selling tubs of five pre-peeled hard-boiled eggs.

The demand for these kinds of convenience products is growing, says Anthony Fenech, so he and his brother bought machinery that boils and peels eggs.

Undoubtedly, other egg producers will follow suit and invest in machinery to be able to offer these convenience items and see off the foreign competition.

Ultimately, Malta’s egg producers will need to crack eggs to maintain their market supremacy.

Egg counter

■ Malta produces an estimated 109 million eggs a year, up from 98 million 10 years ago

■ An average hen lays between 300 and 325 eggs a year

■ Ballut Farm is the biggest in the country, with a laying flock of 70,000 birds

■ A population of 336,208 laying hens in the Maltese islands.

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