Genetically “Tweaked” Chickens Suffer from Lack of Fertility: Is the End of Commercial Poultry Near?

American roosters are becoming infertile, resulting in fewer chickens and rising poultry prices.

by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News Editor

A Reuter’s story recently reported that the world’s largest chicken breeder is suffering from rooster infertility due to genetic manipulation. The popular Ross male breed of roosters is used to produce as much as 25 percent of the nation’s chickens raised for meat (broilers). According to the report:

Aviagen sent a team of scientists to Sanderson last autumn to study the issue and has acknowledged that an undisclosed change it made to the breed’s genetics made the birds “very sensitive” to being overfed, he said.

“We fed him too much. He got fat. When he got big, he did not breed as much as he was intended to,” Cockrell said about the breed of rooster. “The fertilization went way down, and our hatch has been way down.”

Aviagen regularly tweaks genetics in birds to improve them, Cockrell added.

Aviagen declined comment on changes to the rooster’s genetics.

Aviagen is a poultry breeding company based out of the U.K. They are one of only three main poultry breeding companies that remain supplying most of the world’s broiler parent stock, and two of these firms reside in the U.K. supplying 90% of the parent breeding stock of broilers worldwide. So this is potentially a huge problem, and financial forecasts are predicting much higher chicken prices in the near future. This is causing a windfall of profit for the large U.S. based poultry operations, as Reuters reports:

High chicken prices due to the production constraints have helped push up the stock prices of Tyson and Sanderson this year, by about 17 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Both Tyson and Sanderson reported net income more than doubled in their fiscal second quarters.

So what are these “genetic tweaks” and why have they resulted in infertility problems with the world’s major poultry producers?

As one can imagine, these are probably carefully guarded industry secrets, but changing poultry genetics through selective breeding is nothing new. This practice has produced today’s breed of broiler chickens, commonly referred to as a “cornish cross,” which allows them to grow rapidly to large double-breasted chickens in about 7 weeks indoors in confinement.

Large broiler operation in Florida using the “cornish cross” white chickens. Image source.

Using selective breeding methods to change genetics does not usually bring about major changes in the first generation of chicks, however. It generally takes about five years to see a specific issue addressed in changing genetics through selective breeding methods.

In recent years, however, there has been a great effort made to map the broiler chicken genome. The full genome was actually published in the December 2004 issue of Nature.

Are the major poultry breeder suppliers now practicing “transgenics,” the removal of genes or the artificial moving of genes from one individual or species to another? There are no published reports of such a “GMO chicken” on the market, and the National Chicken Council in the U.S. denies that there is a GMO bird in production in the United States on their website. The current copyright of their website (at the time of this writing) is 2012, however, and is already a couple years old. So it is not current information.

Since 90% of the parent stock of all commercial broilers are currently produced in the U.K., are there even any laws in place to prevent these breeders from using transgenics to produce a GMO bird? They know full well the public is not in favor of such a meat bird, so it is highly unlikely they would reveal this if indeed they were using these breeding methods. Could it be the public has been consuming GMO chickens for years already?

The Problem with GMO Chicken Feed

Aside from the reported genetic issues related to rooster infertility admitted to by Aviagen, one has to wonder what multiple generations of breeding on commercial GMO soy and corn has also done to the parent stock.

At Tropical Traditions, I work with small-scale farmers to raise organic pastured chickens outdoors on pasture to ship to consumers nationwide. However, these farmers get their chicks from the same supply chains, and the past few years have been very difficult years to raise a cornish cross on pasture even with organic non-GMO feed. The losses have been far higher, and usually the losses are highest when the chicks are still in the brooder, prior to being transferred to pasture. This suggests that there is something wrong with them at the start, directly from the breeder. Since they come from parent stock raised and fed a commercial non-organic feed that would be primarily GMO soy and corn, organic farmers are beginning to wonder how this feed has affected the parent stock of the broiler industry.

Dr. Don Huber is a scientist who has worked in his field for over 50 years, and has studied the effects of GMO feed and glyphosate pesticides on animal fertility. He is a Professor Emeritus of plant pathology at Purdue University, and he coordinates the “Emergent Diseases and Pathogens Committee” as part of the USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System under Homeland Security. In 2011, he sent a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack alerting the federal government to a newly discovered organism that may have the potential to cause infertility and spontaneous abortion in farm animals, and linked to GMO crops.

Is the GMO feed connection to animal fertility even being considered with poultry, however? What does the future hold for the worldwide broiler poultry industry, and their industrial model of production?

Small-scale poultry operators who emphasize the pasture model might want to start looking at non-cornish cross types of birds and heritage breeds. These birds can be much hardier, and are typically better foragers, needing less feed when they are raised outdoors on pasture.

For this model to succeed however, the consumer needs to wake up and realize that cheap chicken, with its large double breasts, is only possible under the commercial factory bird model, which relies upon subsidized crops like GMOs. A heritage breed chicken raised outdoors on non-subsidized feed costs much more, and they will not taste the same either. This is the way chickens used to be raised, however, back when chicken was one of the most expensive meats on the market, and usually only part of Sunday dinner or holiday celebrations.

We are a long ways away from the consumer understanding this, but if the commercial poultry industry self-destructs due to its reliance on GMO technology, there may not be many choices left in the future.