Discover Nikkei

https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/interviews/clips/696/

The enormous demand for chick sexers in the chicken hatchery industry

And sometimes it really is a madhouse. You have a lot of traveling to do, and some hatcheries will produce, oh, I don't know, hundred thousand, two hundred thousand in one hatch day. And out of a hundred thousand, you would assume there would be fifty thousand females, fifty thousand males, generally speaking. And you have this one hatchery that has hundred thousand chick capacity, and so you call in other chick sexers around the area, and you get a system going where maybe three, three, two to five chick sexers, or two to four chick sexers would do a hundred thousand chicks. And then you go to another hatchery and meet there, and do another quarter million chicks. And you go to another hatchery—this is all in one day's time. And to have another hatchery that's, wants broilers sexed, and they would have several hundred thousand themselves. So it wasn't a matter of just a few thousand per day, it was, it was in the hundreds of thousands of chicks that we had to process.


chick sexing

Date: March 15 & 16, 2006

Location: Washington, US

Interviewer: Megan Asaka

Contributed by: Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project.

Interviewee Bio

Nisei male. Born 1923 in Spokane, Washington. Spent childhood in downtown Spokane where parents ran the World Hotel. Father also worked as a mail handler for the Great Northern Railroad. Attended Lewis and Clark High School and Washington State University. During the war remembers seeing train cars pass through Spokane with Japanese Americans headed to Heart Mountain incarceration camp, Wyoming. Drafted into the army in 1944 and served at the Military Intelligence Service Language School in Fort Snelling, Minnesota and Presidio, California. After World War II, worked as a chick sexer in upstate New York and surrounding region for thirty years. Returned to Spokane in the mid-1970s and pursued a career in real estate. Currently lives with wife, Susie, in Spokane and is an active fly fisherman. (March 16, 2006 )