Each year, the egg industry kills 6.5 billion male chicks, but can we prevent this practice? Scientists have found a way to reduce this mass culling through new technology.
Leading the charge is the Netherlands-based company In Ovo, a spinoff from the University of Leiden, whose automated technology determines the sex of chicks during egg incubation, leading to improved animal welfare and a more sustainable poultry industry.
Day-old male chicks are usually considered a byproduct when farmers breed layers for eggs. Current practice sees egg farmers checking the sex of each chick manually after hatching. These chicks cannot be raised and sold as poultry meat, as meat-poultry chickens are a specialised breed that differs from egg-laying chickens. Male chick breeds for laying will not get big enough to sell as meat.
Despite being one of the largest and oldest problems in the poultry industry, this issue has received little attention until recently. But now, consumers, supermarkets and policymakers are putting pressure on the poultry industry to find a solution. Germany, for example, issued a ban on the slaughtering of male chicks in 2022.
One solution? Remove male eggs from incubators before hatching.
The technology automatically identifies male eggs on day nine of incubation using a single sex-linked biomarker discovered in 2016.
Within a few seconds, the machine drills a tiny hole in the shell and harmlessly takes out a small drop of fluid. The hole is then closed. Mass spectroscopy screens the samples for the biomarker to determine the sex of the chicken.
The technology, which has operated at a commercial hatchery in the Netherlands since 2022, can also reduce the environmental impact of the poultry industry in cases where male chicks are not killed immediately after hatching. Some factories rear males for meat, but as egg-laying chickens take longer to grow, this demands more feed and creates more waste than rearing chickens bred for their meat.