How to sex the baby chicks?

[yinepu]

Most of the hatcheries are not the smaller hatcheries that sell retail, such as the Ideals, Meyers, or Cackles of the world. These hatcheries only represent a fraction of the industry. Most of the eggs are hatched by and for the gigantic commercial egg laying industry which dwarfs the retail retail side of the business. These hatcheries don't sell straight runs, fill small orders, include packing peanuts, etc.

Technology already exists that could easily sort the eggs, by shape, at conveyor belt speed. Sorting technology is already in use by many, many industries and doesn't require people handling individual objects.

and most hatcheries still do things by hand.. hatching out hundreds of thousands of chicks a day.. (meat industry).. for them, there is a market for both males and females.. since they all are destined for the dinner table anyway.. I have never walked into a broiler house that had only pullets or cockerels.. every broiler house I have ever been in has all straight run chicks.

the egg sorting machines are used more for the selling of eggs for human consumption.. they have to sort the eggs by grade and check for cracks.. which the machines can do that a lot faster than a person can.. however most hatcheries do not sell eggs for eating.. they are in the business to hatch as many eggs as needed to fill their orders.. two different industries for the two different uses of eggs

lets suppose for arguments sake that the eggs could be sorted by shape in order to sex the chicks.. lets also assume that it works 100% of the time (yeah.. I know.. it's hypothetical.. but bear with me).. so if 50% of eggs produce pullets.. and 50% of eggs produce cockerels.. even if they could afford to invest in some sort of machine to sort the eggs by shape.. they would still have 50% of those eggs to dispose of (and as i stated before.. hatcheries are in the business of selling chicks.. not eggs for eating). In order for them to sell those eggs for eating they would have to meet more standards and also have the machines to clean them to make them fit for the grocery store shelves. Most hatcheries don't want to be bothered with the expense (which they would have to pass on to us).. plus they would have to have separate facilities in order to meet the government regulations.. for them.. especially the smaller hatcheries the cost involved doesn't justify it

 

[Ridgerunner]

I’m having fun with this thread. I still don’t see how a tiny patch of missing DNA can trigger a hen’s shell gland in which shape to make an egg, and I don’t see any evolutionary advantage to doing so. I still don’t believe it works. However, I’m going to do some out-loud thinking on whether or not there would be an advantage to big-time commercial broiler and egg-laying flock’s hatcheries to be able to predetermine sex of the chicks before they incubate. Please shoot down my logic if and where you can.

With the meat birds, pullets take longer to get to butcher weight than cockerels. Initially, you might think this would give them an advantage if they could only hatch cockerels. But, unless they could selectively breed hens to lay mostly male-producing eggs (not going to happen), they would have to discard half the eggs before incubating. That means they would have to feed twice as many breeding parents to get enough cockerel-producing eggs. I’d think the cost of the extra week of feeding pullets would be offset by the cost of housing and feeding the parents. I’m not sure on that, though, since housing one hen and the equivalent percent of a rooster to lay eggs might be cheaper than feeding all her female offspring for an extra week or two to get them to butchering age. You’d have to run some costs with real numbers to really assess this.

With the egg layers, you do not want to feed any male chicks at all. They manage that by using sex linked traits and having humans sort the chicks. Red sex links, black sex links, feather sexing, they are work better than vent sexing and are pretty quick. You would still have to feed the same number of parents to get the same number of pullet eggs if you could sort them by shape, so that is a wash. You could reduce incubator and incubation costs, so that would be a plus.

You would have to sort the eggs. This could be done mechanically, but I’ll get back to that. If you knew you regularly had a pretty large supply of “male” hatching eggs you would regularly have to get rid of, you might find it economically beneficial to sell them commercially. It may not be as cost effective as a pure laying flock, but anything to use byproducts to reduce cost….. On that note, I don’t know if the hatcheries make any money with the biomass of the male chicks or if it is a net expense to get rid of them. I’d think it is a net expense when you figure in the cost of incubating them. The biomass of the raw eggs should be the same, just in a different form.

I think one flaw in where this might work is in sorting the eggs by shape, whether you do that mechanically or by hand. All this assumes they can be 100% sure of all eggs prior to starting incubation. Some are pointed, some are round, and a lot are somewhere in between. Where do you draw the line? I just sorted two dozen eggs. To me, 10 were obviously pointed. Five were clearly rounded. Nine were maybe this and maybe that. If I had to, I could make a decision on those 9 with several of them maybe pointed, but my confidence level would not be tremendously high on several of them.



If you try to fit it exactly 50-50, I think you are going to make some mistakes. What percentage mistakes, I don’t know. Nine out of the 24 I had in my collection bowl? Probably not. You’d probably get better from experience. But I’d think at least 4 or 5. How do you compensate for this? Feed broiler pullets that hatch top butcher weight and still sort the layers by sex-link traits like they do anyway? Figure out what percent mistakes you make and increase the laying flock proportionally?

I know that on the economies of scale the broiler and commercial egg layers work a small advantage can be turned into a real financial advantage, and I’m not involved in either to know what those real advantages might be. All this is just thinking out loud without any real knowledge of the true costs and potential savings. If you could be 100% certain on each egg, maybe the margins would be there. I think they probably would. But I’m not as sure as I was. After sorting those eggs, I’m not very sure that you can always be very sure either.

I’m not aware of any studies on the scale to prove or disprove this theory. I tend to think it would have been studied by industry to determine if it worked and to what degrees so they could look for a commercial advantage, but I have not seen anything.

Just thinking out loud and having fun with it. Don't take it any more seriously that I did.

 

[yinepu]

From what I know of the meat bird industry and hatcheries in general (after having several relatives raise birds for the meat industry, and having worked in hatcheries as well as processing plants myself).. i always get a good laugh at the people who think that perdue or some other outfit would go to the expense to sort eggs into male/female if it were possible.. the costs outweigh the profits.. and as we know big business is all about profit..

My Aunt who started raising broilers for Perdue many many years ago started out with one broiler house.. it was owned by Perdue as well as all the equipment as well as the chicks and the feed.. it took them years to finally own their first house and from there they expanded .. last time I checked they had over 10 broiler houses and adding on more ... they have raised birds for Perdue, Shore Good, Allens Poultry and a few other companies.. but that came after a lot of years of hard work with little payback from Perdue. I spent several summers there helping out.. the chicks they got in went to market at 8 weeks of age regardless of size because Perdue had more chicks coming in to replace those (at the time it was 8 weeks for Perdue and 6 weeks for Shore Good).. so if a pullet was small.. so be it.. any birds that didn't meet perdue's size requirements would have been processed anyway and sold to a company like Campbell's soup or some such where it wouldn't carry the Perdue brand. They wouldn't hold back smaller birds because they had to clean out the chicken houses and have them ready for the next batch.. Perdue had them on a schedule and expected them to be ready when the new chicks were hatched out. At the processing plant the processed birds would be graded on size and shipped out accordingly.. small birds or birds with broken bones or too many bruises would get shipped out to be processed as soup, chicken nuggets, dog food and so forth... "perfect" birds would be packaged with the Perdue name.. so every bird had a purpose regardless of size or shape

 

[Ridgerunner]

Yinepu, you make an obvious point I knew and forgot. They will totally clean out the broiler house at a certain time, disinfect it, and start the next batch. They are not going to sort out the pullets for further feeding. So a broiler house full of cockerels that are more likely to reach the size to be sold as a carcass as opposed to the size sold for nuggets or soup should be more valuable since I'd expect the cost per pound to be quite a bit different. So maybe another argument for sexing them? A better average price per pound of the final product.

But since it is all about profit as you said, I have two possible conclusions. Either sexing them is not profitable or it is not possible, whether from the shape of the egg or any other way.

I think it a fun philosophical discussion, but I really don't know the costs and profit margins, so I can only speculate and have fun with it.

 

[kovalines]

I'm having fun a lot here!
But this reality is really different here. Here, there isn't big hatcheries where the citizens can buy chicks of specific breeds. If there's any, I've never heard of it.
The chick here are sold by people who have small flocks... So, I'm just reading curiously what you are saying and imaginating how it is!

 

[Fred's Hens]

This is a good discussion, because the spirit of the participants is inquisitive and friendly.

I understand the broiler hatcheries don't have "quite" the interest in the possibilities of sexing eggs (to coin a phrase, I guess) although push comes to shove, even the broiler industry might count the pennies of a cockerel versus a pullet in feed to weight gain and finish differential. I was referencing more the table egg industry and their hatcheries, which are enormous. These commercial hatcheries have the particular need/want for sexing eggs. They've absolutely zero need for the males hatched. The labor handling cost, the racking costs, the cost of natural gas or electricity to incubate for 21 days then "waste" half their eggs is not something they'd prefer to do. Thus, they are very keen on sexing the eggs, if they could.

The laying industry spends millions in research to accomplish egg sexing, to spare themselves the cost of hatching unwanted cockerels. The studies most promising so far involve pin piercing each each, hundreds a minute, on a conveyor, of course, and getting an instant read out of the proteins and enzymes inside the egg, disclosing, if they can, the sex of the egg. The problem is that the egg is so fresh, and so little enzymatic "build up" or differentiation has yet happened and is proving difficult to measure. This is just one methodology being funded in research. Some bedtime reading assured to put you to sleep. Scientific Poultry Journals.

http://jas.fass.org/content/88/4/1358.full

http://www.poultryscience.org/docs/pba/1952-2003/2001/2001 Phelps.pdf

Thus, if merely the egg shape would tell these hatcheries what they desperately WANT to know, they'd be doing it and not wasting millions dollars doing the research nor millions of dollars in handling, racking, and incubating a 1/2 crop.

With al that said, it does remain within the possibility that a particularly attentive flock keeper could know her/his hens, their shape and their propensity for laying particular eggs that such a flock keeper might possibly do quite well in "beating" nature's 50/50 law. I don't shut my mind to that possibility, but scaling it, repeating it among unknown and unfamiliar hens and eggs? Universally establishing a "sexing" technique of egg, based on shape?

Aristotle in 340 B.B. noted what he too thought was a correlation between egg shape and sex. Turns out, interestingly enough, he speculated the opposite, assigning the male and female to the opposite egg shape, of what has been suggested here.

 

[yinepu]

Aristotle in 340 B.B. noted what he too thought was a correlation between egg shape and sex. Turns out, interestingly enough, he speculated the opposite, assigning the male and female to the opposite egg shape, of what has been suggested here.

now that really is something to think about.. people for centuries have pondered the same thing we are today... pretty cool huh?

 

[yinepu]

I think one flaw in where this might work is in sorting the eggs by shape, whether you do that mechanically or by hand. All this assumes they can be 100% sure of all eggs prior to starting incubation. Some are pointed, some are round, and a lot are somewhere in between. Where do you draw the line? I just sorted two dozen eggs. To me, 10 were obviously pointed. Five were clearly rounded. Nine were maybe this and maybe that. If I had to, I could make a decision on those 9 with several of them maybe pointed, but my confidence level would not be tremendously high on several of them.

you made an interesting point.. so lets add in another monkey wrench into the mix... lets go on with the hypothetical situation where you can sex them by egg shape.. what if it were purely genetic?.. meaning if it were like feather sexing or other sex-linked traits.. where some bloodlines could be sexed by egg shape and others could not?
So not only would the breeders be breeding for more meat or egg laying capabilities.. but they would also have to breed for birds who would lay true to egg shape type..

so for fun....lets take it one step further.. think of the chaos that would ensue if you could raise hens who would only lay round eggs that were guaranteed to be females... lol.. where would you get the roosters to carry on those traits if the hens only laid eggs that were pullets?...


I have to wonder if 2000 years from now people will still be wondering about egg shape ...

(that is assuming the 2012 Mayan chicken gods don't wipe us all from the face of earth this year

)

 

[bestpractice]

I'm glad everyone enjoyed the article from Mother Earth as much as I did. It's an old article, but still interesting and newsworthy. Please direct any praise, criticism, disappointments, or other comments about the article to the author

.

The main point of my post was the ability to sex live, day old chickens. The videos take the guess work out of sexing chickens and it looks like most of you agree with that. The vast majority of people think sexing a chicken is hard, but it isn't. Most of us are capable of sexing our own chickens during the first few days of life which is pretty cool -- or at least I think it's cool.

My very first live chickens from McMurray are 3 weeks old and they are going out to the chicken house in the morning. I have fixed up a very nice 5' X 5' space for them. I am not at all thrilled with having them in the basement. About 2 days after I put fresh bedding down, they start stinking up the place

. I'm learning so much from the information everyone here has shared. I'm glad I could share something with y'all. Enjoy and have fun with your eggs

 

[kovalines]

Most you have pure breed chickens, haven't you?
So, in the next incubation, let's try this egg shape method with your breed chickens and I'll try here with the ''caipira'' (mutts, barnyard). Lets see if will have any result. If ti works only with some specific breeds or happens with the ''caipiras''.