TECHNOLOGY AND POULTRY INDUSTRY.

New Zealand's poultry industry is keeping a close eye on emerging technology which could stop male chickens in the egg industry having to be killed. The layer hen industry breeds about three million hens a year and about the same number of male chickens. The wrong breed for eating, these chicks are killed when they are a day old either by gassing or being instantly killed in a machine with a blade. Although the practice meets animal welfare standards, egg producers say they would be keen to embrace new genetic marker technology, which would identify the chick's sex before it hatched "or any sign of consciousness, which some people have some issues with". German scientists have developed a new technique which could be commercially tested as soon as next year. "In-ovo sexing" involves analysing chemical biomarkers to determine the sex of a chick on the ninth day of incubation. Australian scientists are looking at another method involving gene marking and Canadian researchers are also at work on the problem. In the United States this week, the United Egg Producers pledged to stop the mass culling of male chicks by 2020, or as soon as it was "economically feasible," according to animal welfare group Humane League, which sparked the talks. "Male chicks are useless to the egg industry, so industry disposes of these newborns in the most brutal of ways," Humane League's Aaron Ross said. In Australia, where six million male chicks are culled each year, caged-egg farmer Bede Burke in Tamworth said the industry was "excited" by the innovations. "Killing half your chickens and disposing them is a massive cost, and in ovo sex determination solves part of the problem," Burke said. Richard Rayner, chief executive of Specialized Breeders Australia, said he welcomed innovations to eliminate the "unfortunate side effect of the layer chicken industry". "It's not so much a cost issue, as it's an ethical and consumer perception issue. It's not a welfare issue as they do get killed humanely, but an ethical one," he said. In New Zealand, Brooks said roosters from layer hens - hens breed for eggs - could not simply be used for meat because poultry farms used different breeds for eating. Previous innovations to improve birds' welfare had been quickly adapted here, such as beak trimming, which was now done with a infra-red beam. "We're a tiny, tiny industry. We had 110 million meat chickens last year, that's a fifth of the size of Mississippi State [in the US]...but nevertheless we're seen as innovative."] Culled from NZFarmer.