Chick Processing Room Ensure good chick health and welfare with fast and stress-free chick processing

From the time chicks leave their incubators to being transported away from the hatchery, they need to be cleanly separated from their shells, accurately counted, sexed and carefully placed in their stacker trays in a fast, stress-free process.

Ceva Ecat-iD Campus works tirelessly to ensure that all its equipment works together efficiently and effectively, reducing the amount of manual handling that can cause injury or stress to the birds and drastically reducing dropped and trapped chicks. Creating the smoothest, safest process at the hatchery and producing the highest quality of chicks is the main purpose of Ceva automated equipment.

Chicks Separator

Ecat-iD's chicks separator solutions have the ability to allow saving time and labor costs.

This machine was carefully and efficiently made to allow chicks to pass through rollers onto a conveyor below, having egg-shell waste automatically separated and carefully removed.

Chick Counter

Moving chicks as quickly as possible through the hatchery is paramount, always respecting animal welfare principles.

Our automated chick counter can process up to 60,000 chicks per hour, via two separate ways, ensuring that the exact number of birds is filtered into boxes ready for swift transportation to farms for earlier feed and water access.

Why do broiler poultry producers perform gender sorting?

Rearing broiler males and females separately helps poultry producers to address better individual feeding and management needs at the farm, thereby improving flock body weight homogeneity at the slaughterhouse.  A more homogeneous body weight reduces slaughtering cost as the speed of the processing line is higher. It also allows poultry producers to value better the carcass and cuts according to the expected meat market. 

What is the main problem with current gender sorting practices?

Manual Gender Sorting is not accurate.

Today, manual gender sorting is a common practice across the world. However, as it is an operator dependent process, gender sorting accuracy is not consistent. The error rate quite commonly reaches 10-20%. This inconsistency stops producers from gaining the full benefit of gender sorting which negatively impacts farm and slaughterhouse KPIs.

GENDER SORTING TECHNICS

How to differentiate broiler day-old male with female?

At hatch, broiler males and females can be differentiated by looking at their wing feather length. Feathering growth of covert feathers (located on the upper side of the wing) in relation with the primary feathers (located under covert feathers) varies depending on the bird's gender:

• Females are fast feathering; primary feathers are longer than the covert feathers.

• Males are slow feathering; primary are shorter or equal to the covert feathers.

Is feather sorting applicable to all breeds?

Feather sorting is not applicable to all broiler breeds in the market. The capability of being feather sorted is a consequence of genetic selection. Only SF lines (Slow Feathering) are feather sortable. In principle, two main general rules can be applied:

• FF lines (Fast Feathering line) are not feather sortable.

• If the breeder parents' lines are feather sortable, then the broiler day-old chick will NOT be feather sortable.