Automating gender sorting in the hatchery can improve flock uniformity, processing efficiency and sustainability outcomes, while replacing manual processes with technology that can sort up to 50,000 day-old chicks per hour.
"Nowadays, the manual feathering sexing is not accurate, because try to imagine someone doing this for seven hours, six hours," Danilo Okada, global poultry director of customer value and strategic partnerships at Ceva, said at the 2025 Poultry Tech Summit. "We cannot expect that the accuracy will be consistent, and the accuracy impacts uniformity, processing line, everything."
The technology uses six independent camera lanes that capture 30 to 50 images of each chick's wings from both sides as birds move along bouncing conveyor belts. The movement encourages chicks to stabilize and open their wings for accurate imaging. After processing the images, the computer identifies gender and uses gentle air pressure to separate females into a different channel while males continue straight through.
Optimizing feed strategies for better sustainability
Sorting broiler flocks by gender has economic and sustainability benefits.
In mixed flocks, females are consistently overfed while males are underfed using identical feed regimens. Females require 2% less protein than males, yet standard feeding programs cannot optimize for both genders simultaneously.
"If you have a mixed flock, as-hatch, you have the same feed regime. It means that the female is always overfed and the male is always underfed. You're never targeting the best performance for each gender," Okada explained.
Separated flocks enable gender-specific nutrition programs that reduce abdominal fat in females, improve growth rates and lower mortality during the final growing period. Feed costs decrease while growth monitoring becomes more precise.
Reducing waste also produces environmental benefits.
Feed represents 68% of chicken production's carbon footprint, and each kilogram of chicken generates approximately six kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent.
By lowering mortality and processing condemnations, producers can reduce feed waste, water consumption and energy use throughout the production chain.
"At the moment that you reduce mortality and reduce the condemnation in the factory, you are doing this. You are improving a lot," Okada said.
Flock uniformity benefits
Another benefit of gender sorting is flock uniformity, Okada said.
Gender-sorted flocks can lower coefficient of variation (CV) by up to 4%, resulting in more birds of similar size. This can enable visceration line speeds to increase up to 6% and breast fillet yield consistency to improve by 0.5 to 0.8%. In addition, companies processing strict product specifications can achieve 90% of carcasses within target specifications, he added
"Export and retail, the customers that have very strict product specification — to meet the market demand, uniformity of the flock is essential, not just to have the right product at the right time, but it's about efficiency, about efficiency at the slaughterhouse," Okada explained.
