IT'S 'THE GOOD END OF THE JOB'

Alarms were sounding Tuesday morning at the new Morris Hatchery Inc. building at the Jefferson County Corporate Park off outer Coffeen Street.

In the lobby, a 6-foot red computer was trying to alert somebody, anybody, that doors to the temperature-controlled hatching rooms were open.

After months of planning, construction and customs delays, the hatchery was gearing up the delicate process of turning thousands of eggs into chickens.

The machines were still empty, though, and would be until this weekend. So every few minutes an employee, wearing the star-and-chick logo of Morris's Northstar Hatchery, would turn the alarms off.

At 11 p.m. Tuesday, the first batch of eggs arrived in boxes from a Morris breeder facility in Georgia.

The eggs have to be loaded into incubation units Sunday, so the pressure was on this week to make sure all the backups for the elaborate $1.5 million equipment were in perfect working order.

The $5 million, 28,000-square-foot facility eventually will employ about 15 people and will be able to produce some 300,000 hatchlings per week for export to Canada.

Managing the last-minute details this week was Jeffrey L. Pierce, vice president of North American sales and marketing for Morris Hatchery, who will oversee operations at Northstar.

"We're right up against the deadline to get this done," Mr. Pierce said Tuesday afternoon. "I told customers I'd put eggs in the machines on Sunday, so I'll put eggs in Sunday." The hatchery's first delivery of live chicks is scheduled for July 28. To have time to complete their 21-day incubation, the eggs have to start going into incubators Sunday and Monday.

If the hatchery were to put the eggs in the incubators before Sunday, they would hatch too early for the July 28 delivery. The hatchery has the chicks for less than eight hours.

Northstar Hatchery is planning to be at 90 percent capacity in its first week, producing 270,000 chicks by the end of the month.

Mr. Pierce, who has a Southern accent and a detailed knowledge of chicken breeding, takes obvious pride in his hatchery's state-of-the-art equipment from Netherlands-based Pas Reform Hatchery Technologies.

As the international company's first American customer, Northstar Hatchery will be featured in a Pas Reform corporate video. Bouke J. Hamminga, director of international sales and business development for Pas Reform, was in Watertown this week to supervise a video crew.

Mr. Hamminga said his company provides what are known as "single stage" machines to more than 100 countries worldwide.

Traditionally, he said, American chicken breeders have used "multistage" incubators. Such machines hold eggs of varying incubation periods and are opened every few days so that employees can take older eggs out and put new ones in.

The problem with such a system is that as the embryos age, they have different environmental preferences, Mr. Hamminga said.

"How do I make my climate to fit a 15-day-old embryo if I just said that the climate that a 15-day-old embryo wants is different than a 3-day-old embryo?" he said. "In actual fact you cannot do it. So you make an overall average and hope it's OK."

Pas Reform, in contrast, makes machines that are filled with eggs and then left in the care of automated systems for 18 days. The argument is that such a system improves the health, viability and survivability of the chicks by keeping a stable environment tailored to their incubation.

Popular in Europe, "single stage" systems have been gaining prominence globally as the technology improves, Mr. Hamminga said.

The 18 Northstar incubators, with numbers listed on their red panels, are as big as commercial refrigerators and can hold up to 78,000 eggs at a time.

They feature fans to oxygenate the eggs, automated trays to turn them, computers to monitor their progress and multiple heating systems to regulate their temperature.

"It's a real expensive version of what a mother hen does," Mr. Pierce said. "It simulates the warmth and humidity of a hen's nest."

After 18 days, another machine inspects the eggs for viability, vaccinates them and transfers them into plastic baskets, so chicks will have a place to stand when they hatch.

The baskets are then stacked and placed for three more days in a second Pas Reform unit, this one with yellow panels instead of red.

At the end of the cycle, the hatchlings are separated from their shells and head to a sexing table, where hatchery employees use their wing tips to sort them into black boxes for males or pink boxes for females.

Within seven or eight hours of hatching, the chicks will be on their way to farms in Canada and to their eventual destiny as food at restaurants such as Wendy's, McDonald's or Burger King.

"We've got the good end of the job," Mr. Pierce said. "We get to bring them into the world. Other people take them out."