Egg Production Facts and Stats: How Eggs End Up On Our Plates

How are eggs produced?

On factory farms, where the vast majority of the global egg supply comes from, eggs are produced by subjecting female chickens, known as laying hens, to unbelievable acts of cruelty. Thousands of birds are crammed together, often in filthy, darkened places where the birds have almost no ability to engage in natural behaviors. Meanwhile, their bodies are pushed to produce as many eggs as possible: almost one a day. Compare that to a wild chicken, who would naturally lay close to 12 eggs in one year, and you’re confronted with a nearly 3,000% increase in egg production—3,000% more than what is ‘natural’ for a living, breathing hen.

At the end of their abbreviated lives, hens are sent to the slaughterhouse, where they're destined to become cheap meat via a brutal process known as live-shackle slaughter.

The life cycle of laying hens

The life cycle of hens on factory farms are filled with exploitation at every turn. From birth until death, these birds are subjected to treatment that's far from their best interest, to say the least.

1. Hatchery

Industrial hatcheries are tightly controlled and highly mechanized production facilities designed to bring thousands of chicks into the world simultaneously. These environments are a far cry from what baby chickens would experience in the wild, where they would be protected by parents and allowed to explore their new homes. Instead, layer hens are born into a sterilized world of metal and heat lamps, where chicks huddle together in the absence of their parents— whom they’ll never get to meet.

Shortly after birth, most chicks are sent down a conveyor belt, where they're injected with a vaccine to protect them from a common contagion, known as Marek’s Disease. Then, chicks are sexed—a technical term that leads to a tragic process, in which male and female chicks are separated, and the lives of male chicks come to an abrupt end. Although some countries are banning this practice due to its overt cruelty, it’s still widely practiced. In many egg production facilities. As a result, male chicks are separated from females and sent tumbling into a macerating machine, where they are ground up alive. This needless violence, known as chick culling, happens because the egg industry considers male chicks (who will never lay eggs) to be useless. No eggs. No profit. No life worth living.

The remaining—all-female—chicks then experience their first mutilation. Farther down the conveyor belt, chicks encounter a debeaking machine, where portions of their beaks are sliced off—rarely (if ever) with any numbing agents or pain killers. A chicken’s beak is a crucial sensory organ, allowing them to navigate their world. In a way, a chicken’s beak is like our human hands. Yet on factory farms, beaks are simply seen as dangerous weapons that can peck at other distressed hens. But none of this is the fault of the hens.

2. Growing

Chicks are then sent to grow-out barns, where they reside until they are around 16 weeks old. Baby chickens, known as pullets, are confined in these barns and largely denied access to the outdoors, with no way to feel the sun on their backs or the wind through their feathers. Instead, they wait in this dimly lit barn for the next step of the production process, which, for many millions of hens, is the cruelest of all.

3. Maturity

Once pullets have matured, they're sent to egg production barns where they will begin producing eggs—lots and lots of eggs. Through selective breeding, hens’ bodies have been forced to produce unnaturally high volumes of eggs. In the wild, hens would lay one clutch per year, consisting of 12 or so eggs. On factory farms, hens lay an egg nearly every single day. This unnatural laying cycle takes a serious toll on their bodies, causing a host of medical issues, like prolapses and brittle bones.

When hens are around 72 weeks old, their ability to produce eggs at such an unnatural rate begins to drop. They are then shipped to their final destination, where they meet a terrifying and brutal end.

Learn about the life of Bobby Bob Bob, a curiously clever egg-laying hen.

What increases egg production?

The egg industry is focused on taking as many eggs as possible from chickens while using as few resources as they can—all to achieve maximum profits.

It's not natural for chickens, or any other bird, to lay an egg every single day for upwards of a year. Imagine if every one of those eggs were fertilized and became chickens. A hens family would be made up of close to 365 children—each in need of individual care, food, warmth, and comfort. But humans are experts at manipulating and exploiting other animals, especially when there is money to be made.

Breed

Though there are hundreds of breeds of chickens found around the world, on factory farms one breed has become especially popular. Known as Hybrid White Leghorns, these birds have been selectively bred to lay extremely high volumes of eggs. This breed is also efficient at converting feed into egg production, meaning less food for hungry chickens, and greater cost cuts for these industrial egg farms.

The egg factory farming industry has essentially turned Hybrid White Leghorns into egg-producing machines.

Nutrition

Nutrition plays a big role in egg production, since hens need to consume the right kinds of food in order to create the shells, yolk, and other ingredients of eggs. On factory farms, chickens are fed a blended, artificially-produced, diet that can include ingredients such as wheat, corn, barley, peas, and soybeans—ingredients that could be consumed in whole, nutritious form, by humans directly—cutting out the middle processor, the chicken.

Space allowance

On factory farms, intensive confinement is a given. The more hens you can cram into a given space, the more eggs you can produce—so giving hens living spaces that are scarcely bigger than their bodies is the most cost-efficient. Sadly, the birds wind up shouldering these costs through their own suffering.

The cruelest and most cost-effective type of egg production confines each bird to a small space that’s equivalent to the size of a piece of letter-sized paper. It’s barely enough space for her to stand on, let alone sit to lay an egg. Spreading her wings is virtually out of the question.. Standing up is, too, since the cages are so low that the graceful combs that top their heads easily scrape against the wiring. These cruel confines are known as battery cages. Battery cages are widely considered among the worst abuses suffered by any animal raised for food, and they've been outlawed in the European Union, as well as states like California, Colorado, Michigan, Ohio, and Oregon.

Other types of egg production facilities offer varying degrees of space for hens. Cage-free eggs, for example, do not confine birds to cages. Instead, they are free to roam. However, the picture is still bleak for cage-free hens, who often spend their lives in vast indoor sheds without any outdoor access, or even windows, to catch glimpses of the outside world.

Free-range eggs are a step up from cage-free, often providing hens with some moments to step outside. Going one step further, many consider pasture-raised eggs to be the most ethical type of egg production. In these environments, birds are given ample access to the outdoors, although it's unclear for how long. The claims of egg producers can be hard to take at face value, since the industry has a bad habit of lying to consumers for its own financial gain.

Light management

Manipulating the amount of light hens are exposed to can increase egg production, since light notably affects their reproductive cycles. In nature, hens begin to lay eggs when daylight is present for 14 hours out of the day, and they reach the peak in egg production when there is 16 hours of daylight. Because of this, factory farms artificially light the inside of barns to mimic longer daylight hours, even during winter when days are far shorter.

Do chickens get sad when you take their eggs?

Little scientific research has been done to determine if hens become sad when eggs are taken from them—notably because doing such research is counter to the system itself. In battery cages, the floors are slanted, causing the eggs to simply roll forwards onto collection troughs, almost immediately going beyond the reach of the hen and leaving her little time to mourn.

What is known, however, is the significant distress chickens experience when they're unable to make a nest. Research has shown that hens will go to great lengths to access nesting boxes or private spaces in which they can lay their eggs. In battery cages, where they are cruelly denied nesting opportunities, hens may engage in “sham” nesting, where they go through the motions, despite there not being nesting materials to arrange around their bodies.

Egg production facts and statistics

The US is a major per-capita consumer of animal products, be it cheese, pork chops, chicken breasts, or hamburgers. Eggs are no exception. This snapshot (below) of egg production and consumption in the US might make you think twice about supporting this unsustainable, yet booming industry.

US egg consumption

Over the last decade , egg consumption has remained quite high in the US. In 2009, Americans ate an average of around 246 eggs a year. In 2015, that number rose to 256, and in 2019, it reached 293 eggs— nearly one egg per day.

US egg production and hen population

According to USDA data, in 2021 there were a total of 330.5 million laying hens producing the nations’ eggs. Of these, around 66% (219.4 million hens) were confined to the crushing cruelty of battery cages, while nearly 34% (roughly 111 million hens) were cage-free.

While this is a vast improvement over the past 10, and even five, years, these numbers illustrate the how far the industry still needs to go to clean up its eggs and its act.

US egg production by state

Egg production occurs in many states throughout the continental US. The industry trade group, known as United Egg Producers, provides a ranking of the top 10 egg-producing states:

1. Iowa
2. Ohio
3. Indiana
4. Pennsylvania
5. Texas
6. Georgia
7. Arkansas
8. North Carolina
9. Michigan
10. California

How does egg production affect the environment?

Like other forms of factory farming, egg production is terrible for the environment. Chicken litter— containing feces that are high in ammonia (plus feathers and other waste)—can ferment on barn floors and give off toxic gasses that can be dangerous to farmworkers and the surrounding community. Chicken feces can also seep into groundwater supplies, or be whisked away in streams or rivers, before contaminating distant ecosystems that could be closer to home than we’d like to think.

What you can do for egg-laying hens

Supporting The Humane League's efforts to curb the serious harm caused by industrial egg production is an easy and impactful way to create change on this critical issue. Already, our supporters have been successful in compelling major corporations to banning cruel battery cages and applying major pressure on the egg industry to do better, because chickens deserve better.

Make a difference, right now, by holding some of the big egg-buying corporations accountable. Because change for chickens, and all animals raised for food, doesn’t happen without caring, compassionate people like you.