On January 29, USPOULTRY and the USPOULTRY Foundation announced $200,000 in sponsorship funding for two poultry research projects. The sponsorship is in partnership with the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) and will leverage research dollars for two projects that improve poultry welfare and efficiency. FFAR will match the funds for a total $400,000 investment.

One of the designated projects is the Egg-Tech Prize, an initiative that is developing new technologies for accurate, high-speed and early stage in-ovo sex determination of layer chicks. The Egg-Tech Prize incentivizes companies and individuals to develop a technology that accurately determines the sex of an egg before it hatches and allow hatcheries to divert male eggs to the food or animal-feed supply chains or use them in vaccine production. This would solve the issue of male chick culling and improve the sustainability of egg production worldwide. The six winners of Egg-Tech Prize Phase I were announced by FFAR last November. The winner of the $4.5 million Egg-Tech Prize will be announced in 2021.

The other research project receiving funding is the SMART Broiler Research Initiative, a collaboration supported by FFAR and McDonald’s, that is developing automated broiler welfare monitoring technologies for commercial poultry farms.