The world’s largest meat producer by sales will install a replacement across its breeding program by this fall to boost production, Donnie King, president of Tyson’s poultry business, said on Monday.

The U.S. is hungry for more chicken, and supplies are lean as fast-food companies compete to sell chicken sandwiches and wings.

“We’re changing out a male that quite frankly we made a bad decision on,” King told analysts on a quarterly earnings call.

A company spokesman did not immediately respond to request for details about the variety and origins of the rooster type that is getting the boot.

Breeding companies provide hens and roosters to chicken producers, which then breed the birds and hatch their eggs to produce meat. Tyson owns one the of the nation’s major breeding companies, Cobb-Vantress.

The unexpected decline in hatching hit Tyson in January, after it introduced the type of rooster that is now being fired, King said. The problem is half the reason why the company’s chicken supplies are tight, he said.

“It’s about a 50/50 split between the hatch issue for us and the strong demand,” King told reporters after the earnings call. “We’ll get our supply sorted out.”

Reduced hatching, along with production disruptions related to severe winter weather and the COVID-19 pandemic, drove down Tyson’s chicken sales 3.2 per cent by volume in the quarter ended April 3, according to the company. Prices climbed 7.8 per cent, pushing sales by value up 4.6 per cent to US$3.6 billion.

To meet customers’ needs, Tyson during the quarter bought more chicken from outside companies than it normally does, mainly breasts.

One customer, KFC, has a new chicken sandwich that is selling twice as much as a previous version, according to KFC owner Yum Brands.

“Our main challenge has been keeping up with that demand,” Yum CEO David Gibbs said on an April 28 call.

Nationwide, 842 million chicks hatched during March that were bred for meat, down two per cent from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As of April 1, there were 717 million eggs in incubators, up four per cent from a year ago.

Once Tyson’s new rooster type is in place, it will take a year before the company sees the full benefits from improved hatching, King said.

“That’ll help us in supply,” he said, “supply that we quite frankly need today.”

— Tom Polansek reports on agriculture and ag commodities for Reuters from Chicago.

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Calgary’s animal and bylaw services agency removed the rooster, now named Foghorn, from a city property earlier this year, the university said in a release. The bird was unable to walk, having lost both feet to what’s believed to have been frostbite.

Enter the university’s veterinary medicine (UCVM) faculty, where Dr. Mark Ungrin, an assistant professor, has does lab-level work prototyping and simulating body parts.

“We have mostly focused on the development of teaching simulators, to give veterinary students something to practice on without needing to work on a live animal,” he said in Friday’s release.

“But you can imagine there is a lot of overlap between making imitation body parts for the vets to train with, and making imitation body parts for the animal to use as we have here.”

After learning of Foghorn’s problem, “I immediately thought of (Ungrin) as I knew he had a 3D printer in his laboratory and he might be able to design and create prosthetic feet for the rooster,” said UCVM’s Dr. Daniel Pang, a specialist in small-animal pain and welfare.

Douglas Kondro, an undergraduate mechanical engineering student at the Schulich School of Engineering and a summer student in Ungrin’s lab, was tasked with engineering 3D-printed prosthetic feet for the bird.

“I went and got some moulds of his stubs and scanned them to make a computer model,” Kondro said in a university release. “I got my hands on some wild turkey feet and used the scanner for that as well, and matched them up to get a negative of the foot stump.

“Then I printed off the stumps and printed off the new feet and painted them with silicone, so they’d be sturdy but flexible and soft for the rooster.”

The first pair, he said, “didn’t work. He couldn’t really walk and kept falling over, so I was pretty disappointed. So I made version 2.0 and I strapped the feet onto him. It was pretty exciting to see him strut around.”

Foghorn, equipped with new feet, has since been adopted into a new family and now lives on an acreage near Didsbury, Alta., south of Olds.

“Even though things started out purely by chance, this collaboration is really a very good example of how clinical sciences can tie in with basic researchers and solve a very real and very acute problem,” Pang said.

Rapid prototyping approaches such as 3D printing have the potential to lead to customized prostheses, Ungrin said, for use in both human and veterinary medicine.

The University of Toronto, for another example, recently partnered on a project with a mission group working in Uganda, using digital images and 3D printing to make sockets, customized to the limbs of amputees, for attachment of standard-issue prosthetics.

The U of T staff found that digital images and 3D printing, compared to the usual process of casting and mould-making, can cut the time needed to make a custom-fit prosthesis from days down to hours.

In Foghorn’s case, Ungrin said, “given that this is not our major research focus, the fact that we were able to come together quickly, find a solution and implement it without drawing unduly on anyone’s time was really a function of having the connections in place ahead of time.” –– AGCanada.com Network

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“I’m a born farmer,” says Fomba. “Thankfully, it allows me to help my parents.”

Already an experienced poultry farmer, Fomba lacked the means to expand his project to build a modern chicken coop. The Daba Kamalen project provided him with the tools he needed to build a new coop for his chickens and get their eggs off the ground. But in order to build his new coop, he needed advice and funding to build it to government regulation.

Radio Fanaka recorded every aspect of the coop’s construction from the breaking of ground to the fabrication of clay bricks to make the walls. The Daba Kamalen project allowed Fomba to gain a lot of experience raising poultry, experience that he is willing to share with the young people around him.

One particular breeding rooster he brought into his operation, a Wassaché, nearly doubled his egg production. This gained so much attention on the radio documentary series that a group of young poultry farmers came to see him to learn more about the rooster and to form an association to share ideas.

“If I succeed there’ll be a chicken for each person in Mali,” says Fomba. “A chicken per Malian, that’s my goal!”

Watch the original video on YouTube.

Diakaridia Fomba is a contestant in Farmquest, a “radio reality” series sponsored by Farm Radio International, a Canadian organization that works with African radio stations to deliver extension information to farmers. Each of the six contestants submitted a business plan for a farm operation, and each was featured in a series on Radio Fanaka. The winner receives a cash prize to help start his or her new farm venture.

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But roosters have been delivering a wake-up call of a different sort lately — sounding the alarm over the risks inherent with the increasingly narrow gene pool used in commercial production.

The U.S. broiler industry recently discovered the Ross breed of rooster, which sires as much as 25 per cent of the U.S. broiler chicken supply, has developed a fertility problem.

• Infertile roosters increase shortage in U.S. chicken supplies

After investigating why up to 17 per cent of the eggs these roosters fertilized failed to hatch, the breeder, German-based Aviagen, acknowledged an unspecified change made to its genetics boosted growth rates at the expense of fertility.

We are told the problem has since been fixed through more genetic tweaking, but this seemingly temporary genetic glitch is having costly effects.

The USDA’s chicken production forecast for 2014 released last month predicted only a one per cent increase in poundage from 2013, well below the long-run annual average of four per cent. The agency predicted 2015 production would be up only 2.6 per cent. That’s cutting into the country’s export potential at a time when foreign demand is growing.

The fertility problem exacerbated an already existing shortage of breeder birds.

According to Reuters, breeders reduced their flocks when a spike in feed prices in 2011 squeezed their profit margins. Breeders have been trying to rebuild their flocks ever since and are now looking for other options, such as attempting to hatch eggs that would otherwise have been discarded and keeping their laying hens longer.

The shortages in the U.S. are pushing up prices at a time when beef and pork prices are already at record highs.

Canada sources all of its breeding stock from the U.S. and relies solely on the Ross rooster. But it has been unaffected — at least so far.

Thanks to stability of supply management, Canadian hatcheries are able to contract for their hatching eggs up to two years in advance. The industry reports those contracts are being honoured to date. As such, it appears Canadian consumers will be spared any potential price shock.

But it’s a wake-up call nonetheless about agriculture’s tendency to put all its eggs in one genetic basket.

And it underscores the irony of the University of Alberta’s reliance on charitable donations to preserve its flock of heritage poultry breeds.

• Community comes together to save rare chickens

Two years ago, the flock was threatened by budget cuts, prompting the university’s Poultry Research Centre to appeal for public support under an innovative “adopt a heritage chicken” program. Individual donors — who now number 400 — pay $150 a year in exchange for receiving 24-dozen eggs over a 10-month period.

There are lots of great things we could say about how this approach supports the local food movement and offers urbanites an opportunity to connect with agriculture.

But it’s questionable whether as a society we want to rely on such methods to preserve genetic diversity. The need for such resources is not some nicety — the threat to supply from unforeseen genetic breakdowns is clearly not theoretical.

While the public’s support for this program is heartwarming, what’s needed is a long-term commitment from government.

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That rooster was big, beautiful and fearless. He ruled the roost with ferocious authority until his untimely demise, after which everyone breathed a little easier when moving about the yard. But he came by his aggression honestly. It was in his genes, traits which may have contributed as much to his survival in the wild as they did to his downfall in domesticity.

How genetics are selected and the traits that emerge in commercial production are among the issues dealt with in newly released research reports prepared for the National Farm Animal Care Council committees updating the codes for the care and handling of poultry raised for meat and egg production in Canada. These reports address some of the welfare issues created as a result of commercial breeding choices.

One of the topics dealt with in the scientific review is aggressive, sometimes murderous, mating behaviour exhibited by male broiler breeders. Apparently, due to a combination of genetics and how they are raised, male broiler breeders have a harder time attracting the girls than their counterparts in the wild.

In layperson’s terms, it’s because they skip the dating and go straight to mating. “Males appear to be motivated to copulate, but are not communicating this with the females, either through their inability or lack of motivation to perform courtship behaviour. Certain courtship behaviours such as waltzing, tidbitting and high-step advances appear at low frequencies or not at all in commercial broiler breeders.”

The females aren’t just playing hard to get, they’re running for their lives.

While it’s not conclusive, one theory is that raising males and females together can help stimulate some of the courtship behaviours that get both parties in the mood.

• From the Alberta Farmer Express: Manitoba hens to live in enriched housing

Scientists have also looked at the aggressiveness inherent in different strains of breeding stock, as well as the fact that these birds have been bred for meat yield. Their breast bones are now so big it’s difficult for them to mate, which is understandably frustrating.

Another issue related to meat yield genetics and aggression is the fact that these birds tend to be hungry — all the time. The breeders have become highly efficient at making birds grow, but nothing has changed about their appetites. So their feed intake is restricted to prevent them from collapsing under their own weight.

Feeding them every day instead of every second day was shown to reduce the amount of overall aggression such as pecking, but had no effect on the bad breeding behaviour.

It’s unclear how these reports will support the work of NFACC as committees update the codes for care and handling for poultry raised for egg and meat production in Canada. That process is still to be completed.

But these scientific reviews offer a glimpse into the imbalances that can result from our genetic selection of animals and plants according to a single-minded focus on production efficiency.

Examples abound of some of the welfare trade-offs, of which society increasingly takes a dim view. A federal scientist speaking to the recent Livestock Genomics in Alberta conference said breeding for traits that improve livestock health and performance have fallen by the wayside.

As reported in Alberta Farmer, Karen Schwartzkopf-Genswein pointed out that although production levels of meat and milk have more than doubled in North America since the 1960s, there have been unintended consequences.

For example, high-producing dairy cows are more prone to mastitis, lower fertility levels and higher rates of lameness. Laying hens bred to pour all their resources into egg production suffer from foot problems and brittle bones due to calcium deficiencies.

Researchers’ ability to select for specific traits is improving all the time and Schwartzkopf-Genswein suggests the advent of molecular breeding provides an opportunity to achieve better welfare outcomes.

The same goes for how livestock is managed. The pressure continues to grow on industry to provide so-called “enrichment” or housing and management practices that allow animals to exhibit natural behaviours.

Beef cattle producers are among the few who still make their own genetic selections to build herds that respond to their individual environment and management. They know all too well that genetics that produce big calves are only an asset if their cows can deliver them without a vet’s assistance.

Instead of a trade-off between traits that enhance productivity and animal welfare, the goal should be balance.

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