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Chicks in the Perdue hatchery in Salisbury, Md. The company says an increasing number of its chickens are now raised using “no antibiotics, ever.”
Dan Charles/NPR

Perdue Farms says it has ditched the common practice of injecting antibiotics into eggs that are just about to hatch. And public health advocates are cheering. They’ve been campaigning against the widespread use of antibiotics in agriculture, arguing that it’s adding to the plague of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

This particular use of antibiotics is ubiquitous but little-known. It happens at hatcheries, which lie at the heart of large-scale chicken production.

Hatcheries don’t get a lot of attention. From the outside, Perdue’s hatchery in Salisbury, Md., is just a simple, one-story cinder block building. What goes on inside, though, is amazing.

More than 1 million eggs arrive here every week from breeding farms a few hours away in West Virginia. Unlike the eggs you buy in the store, these eggs are fertilized; there are embryos inside.

They go into massive heated incubators for 18 days. Then, when they’re almost ready to hatch, they’re wheeled out into a hallway. Tray by tray, they go through a vaccination robot.

A bank of needles descends. Each needle punctures an egg and squirts in a bit of fluid: a vaccine against a common chicken virus.