The installation, due towards the end of next year, will include 108 SmartSetPro™ setters, each with capacity for 115,200 eggs, 20 smaller 57,600 capacity SmartSetPro™ setters and 152 SmartHatchPro™ hatchers. The comprehensive installation also includes a complete line of hatchery automation systems, with automated egg receiving, egg transfer and chick handling and a hatchery climate control system that incorporates energy-saving heat recovery systems.

Each setter will be equipped with Pas Reform’s Adaptive Metabolic Feedback (AMF™) – the company’s latest innovation to ensure that specific conditions are maintained throughout the metabolic development of each embryo. AMF™ maximizes uniformity by optimizing airflow, the evaporation of moisture and air redistribution. With annual production set at 240mn eggs per annum, high levels of automation have been commissioned, to reduce labour costs and save time, while delivering accuracy and efficiency in production and promoting high quality in the day old chicks.

The integrated project, being hailed as a ‘live-work-play agro-industrial campus’, will also include broiler and parent stock farms, slaughter plant, waste and recycling plant, feed mill and other facilities. It is anticipated that around 5,000 people will live and work on the ‘campus’ when it becomes fully operational, in 2015.

Dmitriy Aveltsov, Cherkizovo’s First deputy CEO of the poultry division, says that sound experience with Pas Reform as a company and the reliability and performance of its SmartPro™ single stage incubation technologies, were the determining factors in choosing the project’s hatchery equipment supplier.

“In a project of such a large scale, Cherkizovo was looking for a partner who would not only deliver full technical and technological support up to and during installation,” he says, “but who would continue to provide ongoing support, to finetune implementation, processes and routines, as well as the assurance of (round-the-clock) access to service, technical back up and parts availability.

Sergey Mikhailov, CEO of Cherkizovo Group comments: “This project marks a new stage of development not only for our company, but also for the poultry production sector in Russia generally, as Cherkizovo Group introduces progressive standards of effective, competitive production.”

Cherkizovo’s new poultry production and processing cluster will include five broiler sites with a combined capacity of 10 million birds, four parent stock and reproduction sites for 900,000 birds and a slaughtering complex with a 24,000/hour capacity.

At full capacity, the new Cherkizovo complex will produce more than 125,000 tonnes of poultry and meat products per annum.

“We are very proud to have been selected for this important new development”, says Bart Aangenendt, chief executive of Pas Reform, “This is even more rewarding after Cherkizovo Group’s rigorous evaluation process highlighted the reliability and safety of Smart incubators, hatchery automation and climate control systems.”