POULTRY NEWS QUESTIONNAIRE: Jörg Heier

You are now looking back on your first year as Managing Director at LOHMANN BREEDERS. The company itself has been well known to you for years, only the position as Managing Director is new.

After one year of practical experience, where do you now see the advantage of a dual management with separate divisions?

LOHMANN BREEDERS is an internationally active breeding company with production facilities on 5 continents, permanent investments and expansions in the area of production, and with a special focus on work in the area of genetics and the respective requirements of the market.

The dual management enables us as a team to lead the individual areas of the company in a targeted manner with the particular expertise and to develop them further together with the respective colleagues. Numerous goal-oriented discussions and synergies arise as a management team with different perspectives and experiences.

Besides some events in my field, like the first GP day-old-chicks placement in our brand-new farm in China, a very successful exhibition in Utrecht after a long break due to Corona as well as coming back to more travel activities and therefore the possibility to meet the own colleagues in the different locations worldwide, an event outside the poultry world has stayed in my memory, which happened during our LOHMANN SCHOOL in Cuxhaven.

While our team was in the training room with the participants, a child suffered an allergic shock right in front of our office building, collapsed and stopped breathing. My colleagues immediately rushed to help and took life support measures that stabilized the child until the emergency doctor arrived.

It was a very emotional situation for me and my colleagues who saved the child as a team. Only later we all realized what we had achieved together. I remember this extraordinary team spirit very well.

As mentioned before, we have decentralized production in recent years, with the positive effect of shorter transport routes, proximity to our customers and, in some areas, shorter transport routes for raw materials for feed procurement.

In addition, we keep our animals in state-of-the-art houses and facilities with optimal supply systems such as drinking and feeding systems as well as manure drying, storage and transport.

Optimized ventilation and heating systems are also part of our standard and are constantly being further developed. A current focus is on alternative energy generation, such as the use of solar systems.

Our signature is our Technical Service with training of our customers and our own employees, whereby social responsibility is of utmost importance towards people, animals and the environment.

Last but not least, for decades we have made it our task to produce one of the most high-protein and versatile foodstuffs – the egg – globally under current conditions through breeding and breeding progress. Our entire LOHMANN team works on this every day!

Certainly, the last few years have been an extraordinary time for all of us with many challenges – my big challenge? The team, our animals and last but not least our customers, everything is an interacting process.

Additionally, the way of communication has changed significantly and has become digital. Personally, I am very positive about this, and it is a must for companies not only to follow this trend, but to help create it.

However, personal face-to-face exchange is very important at all levels and that’s the only way interaction works. The challenge was and is to bring this into balance.

Of course, I don’t want to forget the current global AI situation and the inflation rate and price increases, which is a big challenge for me but for everyone in the industry and across industries.

The development, especially in the IT sector, is rapid. It is to be expected
that the process of moving data and systems to the cloud will continue.
In parallel, new technologies are already finding their way into the IT
departments of companies. Artificial intelligence, blockchain and Web
3.0 are the current keywords.

As a result, company processes are being further digitalized,
networked and automated. Many processes are already “datadriven”.

Thank you for the interview and we
wish you much success for the future!