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Our Mission
CHEP’s mission is to provide the Canadian chicken industry with hatching eggs that meet or exceed expectations for safety, quality, animal husbandry practices and environmental stewardship. It is committed to providing quantities of hatching eggs that meet the needs of the Canadian marketplace while ensuring fair returns to its members, and supports stable, consistent and profitable growth for all stakeholders.
About the Canadian Industry
There are about 300 farmers across Canada who produce broiler hatching eggs. In 2001, these farmers produced approximately 680 million hatching eggs that hatched into 550 million chicks. These Canadian produced chicks, along with another 100 million chicks of US origin were placed on 3000 chicken farms.
The average producer houses 15,000 birds that begin laying hatching eggs at 26 weeks of age. Each bird will lay about 150 hatching eggs for the next 34 to 36 weeks. This cycle is then repeated when the producer puts another flock of 26 week-old birds into his barns to begin the process again. As a general rule, each farmer produces enough broiler hatching egg to supply chicks for 8 chicken producers.
What do we do?
Our primary responsibility is to ensure that our 300 members produce enough hatching eggs to meet the need of the broiler industry. The system that we operate under is commonly known as supply management. CHEP is the youngest of Canada’s supply management agencies.
To accomplish our main goal, a committee including representatives from the overall broiler industry meet four times a year and evaluate the optimal level of production required to meet the needs of Canadian consumers.
CHEP is also a leader in food safety initiatives. We are in the process of implementing the Canadian Hatching Egg Quality Program (CHEQ™). This program is based on international HACCP principles and is consistent with the food safety approach developed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. CHEQ™ provides producers with a comprehensive set of Good Production Practices that each producer is committed to follow. CHEQ™ is a major component of the Canadian poultry industry’s “gate to plate” strategy. It complements other food safety initiatives developed by the feed mills, hatcheries, chicken producers and processors.
CHEP administrates a research fund financed by producers that provide grants to researchers across Canada to enhance the health and performance of breeder hens, taking into account environmental and animal welfare concerns. CHEP is also part of the Canadian Poultry Research Council (CPRC).
Another CHEP key responsibility is to ensure that decision-makers in the federal government fully understand our concerns, and that they take them into account when developing agricultural and trade related policies.
CHEP also takes care of various regulatory issues such as delivering monitoring quota allocations and inter-provincial movements of broiler hatching eggs.
Directions and policies are determined by a 6 member-Board of Directors. The Board is made of one representatives of each of the five member provinces and two members appointed by the government.
We were established in 1986 under the Farm Products Agency Act through an agreement of the federal government, provincial agriculture ministers and broiler hatching egg producers in member provinces.
Recommended code of practice for the care and handling of farm animals - Chickens, Turkeys and Breeders from Hatchery to Processing Plant
Learn more about the CHEQ™ On-Farm Food Safety Assurance Program.
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Newsletters
Many documents on the CHEP web site are posted in PDF format. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read PDF documents. Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded for free here.