WILTON, Iowa – Every year the U.S. 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 for other uses 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.
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“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.
“Does the animal suffer? No because it's instantaneous death. But it's not pretty because it's a series of rotating blades,” said Suzanne Millman, a professor at Iowa State University who focuses on animal welfare.
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 passing laws that outlawed maceration that companies started puzzling out how to determine chicken sex before the chicks can hatch. Several companies can now do that, but unlike most competitors, AAT's machine doesn't need to pierce the shell and instead uses a bright light and sensitive cameras to detect an embryo's sex by noting feather shading. Males are white, and females are dark.
The 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 U.S. Besides the Cheggy machine in the small eastern Iowa city of Wilton, 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.
That's not a huge hindrance in Europe, where most eggs sold at groceries are brown. But in the U.S., white shell eggs make up about 81% of sales, according to the American Egg Board. Brown shell eggs are especially sought by people who buy cage-free, free-range and organic varieties.
Hurlin said he thinks his company will develop a system to tell the sex of embryos in white eggs within five years, and other companies also are working to meet what's expected to be a growing demand.
Eggs from hens that were screened through the new system will supply NestFresh Eggs, a Southern California-based business that distributes organic eggs produced by small operations across the country. The eggs will begin showing up on store shelves in mid-July and NestFresh executive vice president Jasen Urena said his company will begin touting the new chick-friendly process on cartons and with a larger marketing effort.
“It's a huge jump in animal welfare,” Urena said. “We've done so much work over the years on the farms. How do we make the lives of these chickens better? Now we're able to step back and go into the hatching phase.”
Urena said the new system was more expensive but any price increase on store shelves would be minimal.
The animal welfare group Mercy for Animals has tried to draw attention to chick culling for more than a decade in hopes of ending the practice.
Walter Sanchez-Suarez, the group's animal behavior and welfare scientist, said laws in Europe outlawing chick culling and new efforts to change the practice in the U.S. are wonderful developments. However, Sanchez-Suarez sees them as a small step toward a larger goal of ending large-scale animal agriculture and offering alternatives to meat, eggs and dairy.
“Mercy for Animals thinks this is an important step, but poultry producers shouldn't stop there and should try to see all the additional problems that are associated to this type of practice in egg production,” he said. “Look for alternatives that are better for animals themselves and human consumers.”