Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeConsider ThisCould a New Technology Change How We Manage Egg-Layers?

Could a New Technology Change How We Manage Egg-Layers?

This On Pasture article shares results of research showing that cage free eggs aren't good for chickens or the people raising them. Click to read more.
This On Pasture article shares results of research showing that cage free eggs aren’t good for chickens or the people raising them. Click to read more.

In the United States, billions of day-old male chicks are culled every year because they can’t lay eggs and they aren’t the fast-growing breed that are typically raised for meat. There is a cost to this that is both economic and political. On the economic side there is the cost of incubating those billions of eggs that will not turn into egg-layers. On the political side are the Animal-rights activists whose protests have been effective enough that the largest egg producers on the planet have agreed that they will stop the practice of macerating male chicks by 2020 or sooner if a new technology provides an alternative.

That day may be coming soon.

The Company's Chief Executive, Matt O'Hayer started by trying to find homes for the male chicks. When that failed, he turned to technology to sex the eggs before they hatched.
The Company’s Chief Executive, Matt O’Hayer started by trying to find homes for the male chicks. When that failed, he turned to technology to sex the eggs before they hatched.

Vital Farms has announced a new technology that can sex eggs the day they are laid. The Texas-based company that sells eggs from pasture-raised chickens in 5,000 stores nationwide partnered with an Israeli firm, Novatrans, to make this technology commercially available within a year. “TeraEgg” is a machine the size of a boardroom table that determines the sex of the chick inside the egg in 2 seconds by measuring the volatile organic compounds given off by the egg. These metabolic compounds carry a distinct male or female signature.

But this isn’t the only option. Egg Farmers of Ontario has patented a process that sorts eggs by gender with 95% accuracy. German researchers expect to have their method, which pokes a hole in the egg and uses infrared light to find male or female chromosomes, will be ready sometime in 2017. That’s the time frame for another methodology developed by a Dutch start-up, In Ovo, for sharing their working model that runs fluid from the egg through a mass-spectrometer to determine gender by the 9th day of incubation.

This could change things in a big way for an egg industry that has created methods for raising eggs that provide them inexpensively, but that have also caused increasing concerns and protests from egg-buyers and animal rights advocates. Those concerns have resulted in legislation in different states and different, more expensive ways of raising hens and their eggs.

egg-carton-whiteCurrently 65% of incubated eggs are wasted because 15% of the eggs are infertile, and the half of the laid eggs that are male end up killed. What do you imagine will happen if these billions of eggs head to the market in egg cartons instead? How might that change the kinds of facilities we use to raise eggs?

According to the Washington Post, Vital Farm’s Chief Executive Matt O’Hayer hopes the promise of adding billions more eggs to the market with the use of the new sexing technology will encourage more egg farms to switch not just to cage-free systems, but to housing that gives hens even more space, like free-range or pasture-based.

What do you think?

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Kathy Voth
Kathy Vothhttps://onpasture.com
I am the founder, editor and publisher of On Pasture, now retired. My career spanned 40 years of finding creative solutions to problems, and sharing ideas with people that encouraged them to work together and try new things. From figuring out how to teach livestock to eat weeds, to teaching range management to high schoolers, outdoor ed graduation camping trips with fifty 6th graders at a time, building firebreaks with a 130-goat herd, developing the signs and interpretation for the Storm King Fourteen Memorial trail, receiving the Conservation Service Award for my work building the 150-mile mountain bike trail from Grand Junction, Colorado to Moab, Utah...well, the list is long so I'll stop with, I've had a great time and I'm very grateful.

1 COMMENT

  1. A double plus for the industry. Silencing animal rights activists while increasing profits.

    Before PC this was called “killing two birds with one stone.” (groan, groan, groan)

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