Technologies for identifying the sex of chicken eggs are being rolled out in Europe to help end the mass culling of male chicks, which is still standard practice in the US, UK and Australia.
Farmers only value the females of egg-laying chicken breeds, because males can鈥檛 lay eggs and have less meat than broiler chickens that are raised for food. As a result, are killed straight after hatching each year worldwide.
Recently, some countries have sought to end this practice. Germany was the first, with a ban at the beginning of 2022, followed by Austria in July 2022 and France at the start of this year.
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To comply with this ban, hatcheries in these countries have tried rearing the males for meat, with limited success, or using new tests that determine egg sex so that male embryos can be terminated before they hatch.
鈥淭he problem with rearing the males is that it takes a long time and a lot of feed to grow them to a size where you can actually slaughter them, and their meat isn鈥檛 really useable, it鈥檚 pretty tough,鈥� says , co-founder of Dutch firm In Ovo, one of five companies that have recently commercialised tests for determining egg sex.
The In Ovo technology involves making a tiny hole in the eggshell to extract a drop of fluid.听This is run through a mass spectrometry machine to measure levels of a biomolecule called ASBA, which is higher in females. In a recent , Bruins and his colleagues showed that this could identify the sex of the embryo with over 95 per cent accuracy as early as day 9 of egg incubation, which normally lasts 21 days for chickens.
Importantly, this time period is thought to be before chicken embryos have the capacity to feel pain. A recent study by the Technical University of Munich in Germany measured chicken embryos鈥� heart rate, brain activity, blood pressure and movements in response to potentially painful stimuli like heat and electricity and concluded that they .
Other firms working on egg sex tests include German companies PLANTegg and SELEGGT. These also extract a small amount of fluid from eggs, but instead of measuring ASBA levels, they use a technique called PCR to identify the sex of the embryos based on their genetics.
Then there is Agri Advanced Technologies, another German company, which uses an imaging technique to peer through eggshells and see if an embryo鈥檚 feathers are brown, meaning it is female, or white, meaning it is male 鈥� although this only works for certain breeds. Finally, Orbem, also headquartered in Germany, performs MRI on eggs to look for anatomical differences between males and females.
These tests can all be done using automated machines, which have now been installed by the five companies in 16 hatcheries in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Each machine can sort between 3500 and 20,000 eggs per hour.
Installing the equipment is expensive and the sorting process slows down production, but the additional costs to consumers end up being small 鈥� each of the different tests adds about 1 euro cent per egg, says Bruins. This is because every female that is kept after sorting goes on to produce hundreds of eggs that are then directed to supermarkets, so the extra cost is divided between all these eggs, he says.
At the moment, no hatcheries in the UK, US or Australia are using sex screening to prevent male chick culling. The main egg industry bodies, United Egg Producers in the US, the British Egg Industry Council and Egg Farmers of Australia, told 快猫短视频 they were interested, but were waiting for government funding to help implement the technologies or for more commercially viable options.
United Egg Producers, for example, said that ending male chick culling is 鈥渁 priority and is the right thing to do鈥�, but that a 鈥渕ethod that meets the food safety, ethical standards and scalable solution is not yet available鈥�.
Bruins, however, believes they will change their minds once they see these technologies working well in Europe and the costs dropping over time.
快猫短视频s are also investigating other ways to prevent male chick culling. For example, a team led by at the Volcani Center, an agricultural research institute in Israel, has created whose eggs don鈥檛 develop past an early stage if they contain male embryos. If the technology is approved for commercial use, it could remove the need for egg sex screening because the modified hens would only be able to produce female chicks.
