EggXYt is bringing gene-editing to poultry farms to save chicks and resources

When it comes to poultry farming, the dudes aren’t really that useful.

The market is split up into broilers and layers, i.e. chickens for people to eat and chickens that lay eggs. Hens are obviously the only egg-layers but they’re also much more fast-growing when it comes to meat. Because of this, poultry farms are really focused on getting female eggs but currently there’s no way for them determine sex before going through the entire incubation process in a non-invasive way.

EggXYt is tackling this problem through a gene-editing solution that allows chicken farms to detect the sex of an egg pre-incubation, often weeks before the existing solutions do. The startup is launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield.

The startup’s technology first implants an identifier into the birthing hens that manifest itself only in the male eggs that the chicken has. As the eggs are brought into a farm, then EggXYt’s scanner technology, branded as seXYt, quickly identifies which eggs were male and female and allows the farms to quickly repurpose the male eggs rather than wait several weeks to manually identify them and kill them off.

“Eggxyt makes it possible to count your chickens before they hatch,” said CEO Yehuda Elram. “It uses cutting edge gene-editing technologies, a radical pioneering field that will change how we both produce and consume food.”

The ethical issues alone are certainly tricky, but by identifying the male eggs early, EggXYt gives the poultry farms more time to work out a solution to make use of the nearly 6 billion male eggs that are wasted annually by existing processes. The process also saves the farms from focusing resources on double the eggs that they need to house in hatching facilities.

As the startup looks to roll out this technology, they’re first looking at target markets that have the most friendly regulation — it’s still pending FDA approval — but in saving poultry farms money and preventing widespread chick-killing, EggXYt believes its solution has global appeal.

Published at Tue, 19 Sep 2017 20:56:55 +0000