FFAR Prize Seeks to Revolutionize Egg Production, Improving Animal Welfare and Saving Billions

  • Advanced Animal Systems
MAUI (Oct. 17, 2018) – The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) today previewed the Egg-Tech Prize at the United Egg Producers’ (UEP) Annual Board Meeting and Executive Conference. FFAR plans to offer up to $6 million in prizes for developing technologies that can accurately and quickly determine the sex of layer chick eggs before they hatch.

Skilled workers in the egg industry are only able to identify the sex of the chick after it hatches. For the 6 billion laying hens hatched each year worldwide, a similar number of male chicks are produced that never make it to market. The male chicks, once hatched, are unsuitable for consumption due to poor growth performance and meat quality. As there is no need currently for the male chicks, they are culled, creating major challenges for animal welfare, food waste, farm profitability and energy usage. This practice, known as male chick culling requires the industry to devote significant time and resources to incubating the male eggs only to cull them later.

Male chick culling is a challenge that must be solved. However, promising scientific advancements indicate that it’s possible to develop a scalable technology to determine an egg’s sex before it hatches. Solving this challenge would not only improve animal welfare, but also save egg producers billions while adding eggs to the food supply. Sally Rockey, Ph.D.
Executive Director Emeritus

“UEP and our farmer-members commend FFAR for coordinating this valuable incentive to encourage researchers to move swiftly to identify meaningful, scalable solutions to this issue,” said Chad Gregory, UEP president and CEO. “Assuring the health and well-being of animals simply is the right thing to do. As such, we have an obligation to support practices and technologies that improve animal welfare across egg production and this extends to finding an economically feasible, commercially viable alternative to the practice of male chick culling at hatcheries.”

Current approaches to solving this challenge range from gene-editing to measuring an egg’s hormone levels to determine its sex. FFAR is confident that the industry can build on recent advancements in sensor technologies, engineering and biological sciences to develop a technology that both successfully determines an egg’s sex before it hatches and can be integrated into existing production systems.

If new technologies allow egg producers to determine the chick’s sex early in incubation, over 6 billion male eggs could be directed into the food supply or vaccine production. Furthermore, if an appropriate technology is developed, the industry stands to save between $1.5 -$2.5 billion each year.

FFAR plans to begin accepting Egg-Tech Prize applications in early 2019.