Swiss farms to sex chicken eggs to avoid culling millions of males in Switzerland

The Swiss food industry will adopt a new technology from 2025 that allows the sex of chicks to be determined before they are born by looking at hen's eggs, in order to avoid the slaughter of millions of male chicks, a common practice in the poultry sector around the world. The technique, presented this Friday by the association of egg production farms GalloSuisse, will use magnetic resonance imaging and artificial intelligence to observe eggs around their eleventh or twelfth day of incubation, in order to determine the sex of the embryo and prevent it from hatching if it is male. According to Swiss television RTS, the country is the first in which the entire national poultry sector has agreed to implement this system, which will increase egg production costs by around one and a half franc cents (or euros) per unit. According to GalloSuisse officials, this measure will represent a major step forward for the sector, which was banned by the Swiss government in 2020 from mass grinding ...