Sensing and informatics for non-destructive grading of hatching eggs towards next generation hatchery practices

    

Some of the continents and countries might suffer severe food shortage in the next few decades due to climate changes, global unrest, and economic instability. Therefore, we need major technological advancement for egg and poultry production industry to deal with global animal food security and poultry welfare issues. The current hatchery practices, post-hatch grading of day-old chicks, create many consequences of ethical, economic, and environmental issues such as discarding unwanted and abnormal chicks, and keeping the infertile and dead embryos until the hatch which lead higher environmental loads, energy and space consumption. About 10% of eggs are found infertile in hatching eggs, about 3-5% of embryos become dead and 1-3% of chicks become abnormal. Therefore, non-destructive grading of eggs at (pre) incubation using sensing and information technologies might greatly reduce those problems for the future hatchery practices. Spectroscopy (UV-Vis-IR-THz), single wavelength based near-infrared (NIR) optical sensors, multispectral and hyperspectral imaging together with data science can be applied to explore the least explored incubation period. Visual to NIR region have the potentially for grading of eggs based on internal content (e.g., prediction of yolk content, fertility, hatching time), single wavelength based NIR sensor interestingly abled to diagnose the live embryo and cardiac abnormality during incubation based on heart rate frequency and pattern. The normal chick embryo showed 200-300 bpm whereas some abnormal embryos with bradycardia showed less than 150 bpm. The imaging technology (diffuse transmissive images and fluorescence images) has also potentially to grade hatching eggs. The terahertz (0.4-2.0 THz) pulse has the potential to explore the eggshell structure, thickness, refractive index thus strength of eggshell. Thus, it can be used to grade eggs suitable for transportation. Therefore, introducing a new course curriculum integrating egg and poultry science, sensing technologies and information science might open a new dimension of teaching and extension materials for the next generation hatchery practices to solve the ethical, economic, environmental issues and to enhance sustainable growth of egg and poultry sector globally.

Key Words: optical sensing, data science, egg grading, education and research, animal welfare.