What do large hatcheries do with extra chicks?

[MountainMarans2012]

I might do a thread on this subject with a poll to see what others think about the industry only hatching and selling pullets.
Good for the Industry. Bad for the ones wanting to breed and hatch their own.

 

[NatJ]

My concern with destroying male chick eggs is we might be changing the future of poultry. If all Hatcheries go this route and use these techniques to only allow pullets to hatch this would be a genius way to get more customers since eventually there won't be any Roosters for home growers to buy to use as breeders to hatch their own.
All the independent Breeders will be ones with Roosters not the Hatcheries.
I've been telling folks to keep some Roosters around just in case this does happen in the Hatcheries.

If it goes that far, yes I do agree it would be a problem.

But at the present time, that technology is new, and probably more expensive. So it's not yet an issue with the hatcheries that sell to private individuals in the USA.

I can see it being very useful in countries that ban the killing of male chicks. I can also see it being useful for producing commercial egg-laying hens in any area, since there is no real market for the males of those kinds of hens.

But for the hatcheries that sell many different breeds, to many different private individuals, they may not want that technology. They may not consider it worth the cost. They may want to continue providing male chicks to people who want to buy them (which some people definitely do.) They will almost certainly continue to sell straight run chicks or male chicks of breeds intended for meat, because the male chicks grow faster than females (so better for meat.)

At the worst, I would still expect to be able to buy males of meat-type breeds from hatcheries, and I would expect to get 50% males from any order of fertile eggs (because so far, all of the in-egg sexing requires that the eggs be incubated for a while before they are sexed. This would make it impossible to ship pre-sexed eggs.)

I would also expect some warning of this, not a sudden inability to buy male chicks. By warning, I mean that it would happen for some breeds and/or some hatcheries while other breeds and/or other hatcheries would still be using the older methods for at least a few more years. So that would be the obvious time for everyone to make sure they have roosters.

 

[dheltzel]

I suspect most of the surplus chicks now get sold to TSC and distributed around the country. There are probably contractual limits as to how many can be males, or even straight run, but let's face it - who is really checking and enforcing this. Does TSC even have a process for taking complaints about "pullet chicks" that start crowing?