Effects of dietary n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and ... - FINS

1 st WorkshopXIII International Feed Technology Symposiumeggs have developed serious marketing of production and sale of eggs, in accordance withnew legislative regulations of European Union (directives) relating to poultry welfare,aiming to increase the consumption of table eggs [17].New systems in housing of poultry (improved cages, free range, semi-intensive system, deeplitter, aviary system, organic production, etc.) provide primarily welfare of layers rather thanimprove the quality of table eggs. Considering that in countries of EU 92% of layers are stillhoused in cages it is normal to expect considerable decrease of egg production when newregulations/directives relating to minimum floor space per bird come into effect. Decrease ofegg production in EU countries will result in decrease of profit, increase of price andreduction of number of employees.Increased cost of alternative productions and at the same time of retail price of eggs fromsuch production systems will certainly have effect on the decision of consumers regardingpurchasing of this product. Question is whether the consumers are ready to pay higher pricefor poultry welfare or special guaranteed quality of eggs. Most of the polled consumersconsider safety and freshness when purchasing eggs [24, 25]. Production system is alsofactor influencing the preferences of consumers, in other words entire concept whichincludes farm conditions, poultry welfare, nutrition, health condition, size of flock, etc. Thereare two categories of consumers, ″citizen of the world″ willing to pay more for specificproduct and the other category ″consumer″ who is expressing his concern about theproduction system but is not willing to pay more for such production.New systems of production of table eggs, marketing and systems for monitoring of egg ontheir way to consumer and other way around from consumer to producer will be presented inthis paper.SYSTEMS OF PRODUCTION TABLE EGGSIn production of table eggs many different systems and methods are used which can beclassified and categorized in different way. For this occasion the categorization in EU whichis the simplest and most current will be accepted and presented briefly.Battery (cage) system has been massively used in so called industrial production on farmswith several tenths of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of layers, but also numerousfarmsteads and agricultural households with small or medium flocks of layers. Hens arehoused in cages grouped in so called batteries. According to number of tiers (cage levels)batteries are single tier or multiple tier (2 to 8 tiers). According to the position of cages,multi-tier batteries can be step deck, semi-step deck and vertical. In regard to thedropping/manure removal, they can be fitted with dropping channels, deep dropping lagoonand conveyers. One of the modern types of batteries combines ventilation of the facility withdrying of manure on conveyers to the level of dryness of 70%. Some of the operations andprocedures in batteries (feeding watering, collecting of eggs, manure removal) are manual,mechanized or automatic in different combinations (e.g. all manual procedures in simplebatteries of small capacity, to fully automated procedures managed by PC). Number of hens125