In-ovo sexing in the poultry sector gains traction
Since in-ovo sexing technology has become widely available in Europe, spurred by bans on the practice of male chick culling in Germany, France, and Italy, more and more hatcheries are adopting the technology to prevent negative societal pressure.
Innovate Animal Ag’s Q3 2024 in-ovo sexing roundup dives into the latest news on the technology and what it means for consumers and producers across the globe.
A business roundup
Agri Advanced Technologies (AAT) announced this quarter that they are bringing their in-ovo sexing system called Cheggy to 2 US hatcheries in 2024. Jörg Hurlin, founder and CEO of AAT, expressed his excitement about this development: “The launch of Cheggy in 2 US hatcheries marks a giant step forward for non-invasive in-ovo sex determination technology. This is more than just a technical innovation – it’s a transformative approach that aligns with the growing demand for welfare and sustainable practices in the poultry industry.”
AAT also recently announced that they had successfully installed a Cheggy Zoom machine at the Hatchery van Gent and another Cheggy Zoom at Lohmann Ankum hatchery.
Prominent specialty egg producer NestFresh announced that they intend to be the first to use in-ovo sexing technology in the US, and that they have already placed their first orders for in-ovo sexed chicks with a US hatchery for delivery later this year. The company, which has pioneered many of the most significant changes in the egg industry over the last 50 years, noted that they are planning to make this transition across their entire egg line. These eggs will hit the market by mid-2025 and be accompanied by a third-party certification indicating that the eggs were produced by in-ovo sexed hens.
In Switzerland, a task force representing poultry industry stakeholders announced this quarter that the country’s 2 main hatcheries, Animalco and Prodavi, will adopt Orbem’s in-ovo sexing machines in 2025. The task force, which was established in 2020, includes the primary producer association, both hatcheries, and Aviforum, a leading poultry research centre. Its goal was to find the best solution to the challenge of chick culling. By choosing to implement in-ovo sexing technology, the Swiss poultry industry has effectively decided to end the practice of chick culling on its own, unprompted by government intervention. Orbem also announced that they are planning to install a machine in a new hatchery at Sirevåg, Norway, another country without any governmental ban on culling in place.
eggXYT, an in-ovo sexing technology company, announced a strategic investment from Amuse Inc., a fully-integrated egg company from Japan that operates breeding farms, layer farms, hatcheries, and egg marketers. This partnership represents a vote of confidence in eggXYT’s technology, which uses genetic editing to attach a fluorescent marker to a sex chromosome in male embryos. This genetic marker can then be detected by eggXYT’s scanner as the eggs enter the hatchery. In the press release, CEO Yasuo Akagi said that Amuse “recognises the transformative potential of eggXYT’s technology and looks forward to utilising and implementing it to make the egg industry more ethical and sustainable”.
New research
This quarter, Innovate Animal Ag released an update on its In-Ovo Sexing Market Penetration Report, which shows that, as of the beginning of April 2024, around 78.4 million of the 389 million hens in the European Union were sexed in-ovo, representing a 20% market penetration. This marked a notable 5% increase from September 2023, when the market share was found to be just under 15%.
A new study in Computer and Electronics in Agriculture suggests that hyperspectral imaging could be even more effective at in-ovo sexing when combined with cutting-edge AI techniques. Researchers from China’s Nanjing Agricultural University, alongside ex-Google and Apple talent, analysed hyperspectral images using Google’s Transformer and Vision Transformer attention architectures. Transformer-based architectures have been responsible for many of the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, such as large language models.
Hyperspectral imaging is already used for in-ovo sexing by AAT, the current market leader in Europe. However, since their technology looks at the feather color inside developing eggs, it only works for brown layers. Thus, despite this technology’s relative cost-effectiveness, it has limited applicability for markets like the US which use primarily white layers.
The AI model from this recent paper, however, purportedly works for both brown and white layers, with 95% accuracy on day 10 of incubation. Although the researchers do not posit what sex-identifying features of the embryos the model is detecting, the method could have substantial competitive advantages over other techniques. It remains to be seen whether the research is reproducible, especially in commercial contexts, and whether any existing in-ovo sexing technology company is well-positioned to scale up this new approach.
Join 31,000+ subscribers
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated about all the need-to-know content in the poultry sector, three times a week.
