[poultron]

Hey there, I'm intimately familiar with the poultry industry in all aspects. What you're referencing is for egg-utilizing companies, like unilever, who need eggs in their products (ice creams, etc.). Unilever is requiring their egg producers to adopt new technologies to detect male chicks in the eggs and prevent them from hatching, leading to only the female chicks growing into hens, which lay the desired eggs.

The chicken-producing industry (very different from the egg producing industry) does use males. They're differentiated for some products (Perdue's Oven Stuffer Roasters, for example), but 95% of all producers in the country now run "Straight-run" operations, meaning they dont differentiate between male and female birds (no sexing the chicks and separating them). Originally this was a problem, conforming your machines to process two different sized birds (a double-bell-curve, so to speak), but streamlining the selective breeding over the years has brought the females and males together as far as feed conversions and weight gains go.

Always happy to shed light on the poultry industry and it's many quirks :)

[dredmorbius]

The technical term for a sexual dimorphic bodyweight delta would be a bimodal distribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimodal_distribution

Fascinating bit about selective breeding to reduce the difference though.

Then there's the bit about white meat to the US, dark meat to Russia.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2011/01/the_dark_sid...

[poultron]

Russia has a complete ban currently on dark meat. And Perdue is publicly quoted as exporting zero meat to Russia anymore, dark or white.

Either way, it's the American Consumer that demands white meat... personally I'm a dark meat chap myself.

[gadders]

Interesting to hear about the industry side. We have 20 chickens we keep as a hobby - a mix of hybrids and pedigrees. We can't tell the sex of some of these until they're weeks old, let alone at the egg stage.

[poultron]

Typical commercial sexing methodology is by holding the wings of the chicks out and looking a the feathers on the wing-tips. There are two sets of feathers there; if the feathers are of equal length, the chick is male. If one set of feathers extends further, the chick is female.

https://www.extension.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/p...