The Effect of Housing Environment on Egg Production, USDA Egg Size, and USDA Grade Distribution of Commercial White Egg Layers

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The topic of the paper is well studied and can be found in several studies existing in the available literature. The authors are kindly asked to clearly state and discuss what is the novelty in their study. The Introduction and discussion sections should be re-written, the abstract also. More specifically, for the discussion section, authors should discuss subjectively the reasons their results disagree with most of the previous studies on the topic. A linguistic revision is also recommended. 

Author Response

Hello Reviewer 1,

Thank you for reviewing our paper. Below is your comment with our response under. Hopefully you will find the edits satisfactory.

 

Reviewer’s Comment: The topic of the paper is well studied and can be found in several studies existing in the available literature. The authors are kindly asked to clearly state and discuss what is the novelty in their study. The Introduction and discussion sections should be re-written, the abstract also. More specifically, for the discussion section, authors should discuss subjectively the reasons their results disagree with most of the previous studies on the topic. A linguistic revision is also recommended.

 

You are very correct in that this has been studied quite a bit. However, there are several novelties in this study. Firstly, many of these studies are at least 5 years old. In a recent USDA blueprint, the authors state that as genetics and management practices improve, similar studies must be performed as these improvements can change how these birds respond to their environment. They further state the importance to perform similar experiments in various regions as management, dietary and environmental differences can be confounding factors when attempting to apply research from one region to another. This we wrote about starting on line 49. Secondly, the inclusion of USDA egg grades and sizes is very novel. To our knowledge, no other study has evaluated USDA egg sizes and grades and how they change over housing environments. A statement on this can be found on line 54 and 400.

 

We have also performed some rewrites and edits to these sections to hopefully make them more readable and less confusing and choppy. We added several sentences in several places discussing reasons why studies had different results than ours. Finally, we have reviewed the manuscript and we have found several linguistic errors that have been fixed. We apologize for the sloppiness and thank you for pointing this out.

 

Please let us know if there is anything else we need to do to make this manuscript better and thank you again for your comments.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a well-written manuscript to report the results of the study, which was designed well and performed and analyzed thoroughly.  The subject of the study is important, due to the existence of multiple housing types and the lack of sufficient data to allow valid comparisons across the housing types. I have only minor concerns and a few suggestions for improvement of the manuscript's readability. 

 

1. The authors compare 5 different housing types throughout the manuscript. Due to the similarity of the names, it was sometimes confusing which ones the authors were referring to. For example, in lines 17 and 19 in the abstract, the authors used the term "caged". It is not immediately clear which one of the 5 housings it is referring to. Please use the full names and provide the acronyms in the first place they were cited, and use the acronyms thereafter throughout the manuscript consistently.

2. Lines 31-34. Please revise the sentence starting with "New technology...". It is very long, unclear, and has poor grammar.

3. Line 36: Change "has" to "have".

4. On pages 5-6, numerous formulas are embedded in the text. With a variable length and indentation, they are presented in a less ideal way. Please consider putting all formulas in one table. If these formulas are commonly used and well-recognized in the field, they might be put in supplementary materials.

5. The authors used the word "mediate" twice (lines 403 and 458). I believe the authors meant to say that "enrichments can alleviate or mitigate stress". The use of "mediate" could appear to imply that the enrichment is causing the stress. It was a little confusing for my reading. Consider changing the word.

6. Line 413. I am not sure if the use of the term "prevalence" is correct for the intended use. It means "the percentage of a population that is affected with a particular condition or disease." Please consider more appropriate wording for clarity. Frequency or percentage?

7. Line 22-23. At the end of the abstract, the authors concluded that the standard cage is the most optimal housing type for white egg layers. I am not quite certain if the results can support this conclusion. The choice could be changed depending on the emphasis or other conditions. Or even other aspects that might not be represented in these quantitative parameters such as animal well-being, and customer preference. I can understand the authors' reasoning behind the conclusion, but it could be misguiding. Please consider revising.

8. Lines 15-16. Such details on the use of JMP and ANOVA are not necessary in the abstract. Please remove and use the extra space to elaborate on and expand the conclusion.

 

Author Response

Hello Reviewer 2,

Thank you for reviewing our manuscript and for your comments. Below are your comments with our responses. Hopefully you will find our edits to be satisfactory.

 

1. The authors compare 5 different housing types throughout the manuscript. Due to the similarity of the names, it was sometimes confusing which ones the authors were referring to. For example, in lines 17 and 19 in the abstract, the authors used the term "caged". It is not immediately clear which one of the 5 housings it is referring to. Please use the full names and provide the acronyms in the first place they were cited, and use the acronyms thereafter throughout the manuscript consistently.

Thank you for this comment. we don’t typically like to include these acronyms in the abstract but we added ‘conventional’ in reference to conventional cages in the abstract. We also went and made sure that acronyms were used consistently through the paper where appropriate. We also decided to introduce the acronyms at the end of the introduction because this is the best place where they can appear together. Further, we updated the tables to be clearer.

 

2. Lines 31-34. Please revise the sentence starting with "New technology...". It is very long, unclear, and has poor grammar.

We revised this sentence into two with greater clarity.

 

3. Line 36: Change "has" to "have".

Changed

4. On pages 5-6, numerous formulas are embedded in the text. With a variable length and indentation, they are presented in a less ideal way. Please consider putting all formulas in one table. If these formulas are commonly used and well-recognized in the field, they might be put in supplementary materials.

Thank you for this suggestion. We had not thought about putting the formulas in a table. We have put them all into a table. Please let us know what you think or if you have any suggestions on how to make it better.

 

5. The authors used the word "mediate" twice (lines 403 and 458). I believe the authors meant to say that "enrichments can alleviate or mitigate stress". The use of "mediate" could appear to imply that the enrichment is causing the stress. It was a little confusing for my reading. Consider changing the word.

Thank you for the suggestion! We changed the word to be less confusing.

6. Line 413. I am not sure if the use of the term "prevalence" is correct for the intended use. It means "the percentage of a population that is affected with a particular condition or disease." Please consider more appropriate wording for clarity. Frequency or percentage?

Thank you for the tip. We reworded the sentence for clarity.

7. Line 22-23. At the end of the abstract, the authors concluded that the standard cage is the most optimal housing type for white egg layers. I am not quite certain if the results can support this conclusion. The choice could be changed depending on the emphasis or other conditions. Or even other aspects that might not be represented in these quantitative parameters such as animal well-being, and customer preference. I can understand the authors' reasoning behind the conclusion, but it could be misguiding. Please consider revising.

Thank for your pointing this out. We added a qualifier to the end stating that it was optimal for production performance. We also added a sentence about needing to perform further research specifically addressing stress and health.

 

8. Lines 15-16. Such details on the use of JMP and ANOVA are not necessary in the abstract. Please remove and use the extra space to elaborate on and expand the conclusion.

Thanks for pointing this out! We removed this line in the abstract and added some other info.

 

Thank you again for the revisions and suggestions. Please let us know if there is any other way we can make our manuscript better.

Reviewer 3 Report

Title - need to be edited

Material and methods: verse 73 vaccinated? what preparation? all activities with laying hens should be described in detail

Discussion - should be more concise

Conclusion - a summary should be presented, not digressions and hypotheses

Author Response

Hello reviewer 3,

Thank you for reviewing our manuscript. Below are my responses to your comments. We hope you find these edits satisfactory.

 

Title – need to be edited

Thank you for catching this. We fixed the typos in the title. Although for clarification, did you mean the typos just need to be fixed or did you want a rewrite/reword of the title?

 

Material and methods: verse 73 vaccinated? What preparation? All activities with laying hens should be described in detail.

The vaccine protocol followed standard industry procedure. We did not specify the exact vaccine program as this program was applied on all hens. We did, however, add a citation to the 40^th NC layer performance test grow report that has that information in it.

 

Discussion - should be more concise

We have attempted to rewrite the discussion in order to make it more concise. However, we did not want to omit any of the information or points that we have included. Overall, however, our rewrite has reduced length of the discussion. We also included subsection headers to break up the discussion and make it more organized.

 

Conclusion - a summary should be presented, not digressions and hypotheses

In the conclusion, the only hypothesis that is discussed is the hypothesis that the research performed was based on. We felt it appropriate to reassess the hypothesis of the paper in the conclusion. We are unsure where digressions are in the conclusion. Nonetheless, we have performed several edits on the conclusion to perhaps distill any confusion and focus it a bit more.

 

Thank you again for the revisions and suggestions. Please let us know if there is any other way we can make our manuscript better.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

None