More Robots Are on the Way -- for Chickens

Bloomberg News reports that about 3 million laying hens get daily checkups from machines dubbed “nanny robots.” These sensor-filled humanoids, perched atop a base with wheels, roll through a massive complex of windowless coops for 12 hours a day, monitoring the chickens’ temperatures and movements. Humans pluck feverish or immobile birds from their cages to protect the rest of the flock and keep sick birds and their eggs from reaching kitchen tables. 

Besides the cool technology and obvious efficiencies, the move is for good reason. There's little consumer confidence among Chinese shoppers in a country where food safety is questionable and where chicken eggs have been found to be fake. Fake eggs have plagued Chinese consumers since at least 2005, when the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that fake eggs were being sold at a street market in Guangzhou. The shells were made of calcium carbonate, while the egg white and yolk were a mixture of sodium alginate, gelatin and tartrazine. 

Most of the poultry industry consists of hundreds of thousands of family-owned farms. China’s inability to monitor suppliers creates a food safety nightmare, with poor sanitation, lack of refrigeration, or overuse of antibiotics in animal feed. Bird flu is rampant, with at least two outbreaks reported by China’s agriculture ministry in December 2016. 

This company is China’s third-largest poultry producer, and is using the 18 robots to curtail outbreaks of bird flu and foodborne illnesses that plague a mainland industry that's expected to reach $138.2 billion in revenue by 2012.  

You might be surprised to learn that China is the world’s largest producer of eggs and the second-biggest grower of chickens after the United States, according to market researcher IBISWorld.

This is one more reason that repealing country-of-origin labeling was a bad idea.