Every year the US egg industry kills about 350 million male chicks because, while the fuzzy little animals are incredibly cute, they will never lay eggs, so have little monetary value. That longtime practice is changing, thanks to new technology that enables hatcheries to quickly peer into millions of fertilized eggs and spot male embryos, then grind them up before they mature into chicks. The system began operating this month in Iowa at the nation's largest chick hatchery, which handles about 387,000 eggs each day, the AP reports. "We now have ethically produced eggs we can really feel good about," said Jörg Hurlin, managing director of Agri Advanced Technologies, the German company that spent more than a decade developing the SUV-sized machine that can separate eggs by sex.
Even Americans who are careful to buy cage free or free range eggs typically aren't aware that hundreds of millions of male chicks are killed each year, usually when they are only a day old. Most of the animals are culled through a process called maceration that uses whirling blades to nearly instantly kill the baby birds—something that seems horrifying but that the industry has long claimed is the most humane alternative. Chick culling is an outgrowth of a poultry industry that for decades has raised one kind of chicken for eggs and another for meat. Egg-laying chickens are too scrawny to profitably be sold for meat, so the male chicks are ground up and used as additives for other products.
It wasn't until European governments began outlawing maceration that companies started puzzling out how to determine the sex of embryos. AAT's machine, called Cheggy, can process up to 25,000 eggs an hour, a pace that can accommodate the massive volume seen at hatcheries in the US. Besides the Cheggy in Iowa city, an identical system has been installed in Texas, both at hatcheries owned by Hy-Line North America. The process has one key limitation: It works only on brown eggs because male and female chicks in white eggs have similar-colored feathers.
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Hurlin said he thinks his company will develop a system to tell the sex of embryos in white eggs within five years. Eggs from hens screened through the new system will supply NestFresh Eggs, a Southern California-based business that distributes organic eggs. The eggs will begin showing up on store shelves in mid-July and NestFresh executive VP Jasen Urena says any price increase would be minimal.
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