No more millions of dead roosters? Rapid gender test is about to break through

2023-11-02 18:41:42

In a room full of machines and eggs at the Het Anker poultry farm in Ochten (Betuwe), there are two A4 sheets hanging. One says maleon the other female. Those words show exactly what it’s all about. 4,000 eggs pass through the belt every hour. A thin needle takes a tiny sample each time. After a quick analysis, it can be determined with considerable certainty whether there is a male or a female in the egg.

That knowledge is of great importance. It makes it possible to make a rather uncomfortable part of egg production a lot less uncomfortable. There are hundreds of laying hen farms in the Netherlands: for example, the eggs that chickens lay there end up in the supermarket. All those laying hens – there are tens of millions of them in the Netherlands – also hatch from an egg: in a hatchery like that of Het Anker. There are only a few of these in our country.

But if millions of laying hens are born, this also means that millions of roosters will hatch from the egg. They are an unnecessary residual product. A rooster does not lay eggs and they are not very suitable for meat production compared to much larger broilers. Therefore, male day-old chicks are usually killed shortly after birth.

40 million euros

It was a practice that Wouter Bruins had not yet considered when he studied biology in Leiden in 2011. In a search for topics, he came across the fate of day-old roosters. In 2013, Bruins was already in 16th place By the way Sustainable 100 with technology that is now on the verge of a definitive breakthrough. ‘In Ovo’, the company of which Bruins is co-founder, is receiving strong support from the European Investment Bank (EIB). The European Union-affiliated lender provides a loan of 40 million euros for further development.

Speed is an essential factor, says Bruins. If millions of eggs pass each year, an extensive ultrasound is not an option. “We therefore started looking for a substance that is very easy to measure and with which you can quickly determine gender.” That substance became ‘sabinamine’, named after employee Sabine. “We want to be able to quickly and reliably test whether there is a rooster or a hen in the egg.”

Legislation underway

Over the past ten years, killing day-old chicks has increasingly been seen as undesirable in the Netherlands and abroad. There is already a legal ban in Germany. The result is that many roosters now grow up to twelve weeks. This has disadvantages: it requires feed and the animals provide CO₂– and nitrogen emissions, while there is no demand for the meat. This means that there is great interest in In Ovo machines, especially in Germany. The company is not the only one that focuses on ‘sexing’ eggs. Some competitors are working on similar techniques.

This means that a ban on the killing of day-old chicks is also close in the Netherlands. The House of Representatives already spoke in favor of this in 2021. For the time being, Agriculture Minister Piet Adema (Christian Union) is sticking to an ‘objective’ that he expressed last week: ‘By 2026, no more day-old roosters will be killed for table eggs for the Dutch and German market,’ it reads.

But does destroying the male eggs also cause the discomfort to disappear? Or can a chicken embryo also be seen as life? Now that technology makes it possible to look inside the egg, that is the next debate. “We now test the eggs from nine to eleven days,” Bruins explains. That is about half of the breeding season. Research placed the limit at which consciousness really develops at approximately twelve days, but there is also debate about this. “We also want to test as early as possible,” says Bruins. But it also applies: the younger the egg, the more difficult it is to detect the gender. “Of course it must be feasible.”