In an old Raleigh grocery store, an agtech company looks to grow
The multiple levels and slots of the large machine align the days-old birds in single files. Each chick is then shuttled on a blue conveyor belt past high-speed cameras that analyze their feathers to make a split-second decision: girl or boy.
Girl chicks are called pullets, boy chicks are called cockerels, and many big poultry producers value knowing which are which as early as possible.
That is where Targan, a Raleigh startup founded in 2015, believes its gender identification processor can help. Traditional chicken sexing is done by hand, which carries time and labor limitations. By some estimates, Americans consume 8 billion chickens every year, and at this quantity, the ability to streamline sexing is appealing, said Targan founder and CEO Ramin Karimpour.
He noted his company’s gender identification processor works with about 98% accuracy.
A second Targan processor performs mass vaccinations, using cameras to pinpoint the location of the baby chickens’ eyes before spraying raindrop-sized vaccines into their tear ducts.
“We are basically doing effectively 100,000 chicks per hour without an army,” Karimpour said.
Both high-tech systems are now ready for hatcheries; last month, the company said it delivered its first processor to a customer — though it wouldn’t divulge whether the machine was for vaccinations or sexing.
September was a busy month for Targan, which now employs around 125 people, all in the Triangle.
On Sept. 12, the company officially moved from Morrisville into new headquarters on East Six Forks Road in Raleigh’s Midtown area. Part of the building used to be a Kroger grocery. Gov. Roy Cooper was among the government officials to speak at the ribbon cutting.
While agricultural technology companies are plentiful in nearby Research Triangle Park, Targan stands out at its new location.
“We are happy this is the first biotech company in Midtown, but I’m being promised there are going to be a whole bunch of others coming,” Karimpour said.
Last year, Targan raised $35 million in Series C funding, and its CEO believes the company’s headcount will grow beyond 200 by the end of next year. Besides poultry, the company is also working to commercialize processors for swine.
Growing in one of the largest poultry states
Between the agricultural science talent coming out of area universities and the density of poultry producers in the state, the North Carolina Triangle is a sensible location for a company like Targan.
“A majority of the producers have a presence in North Carolina,” Karimpour said. “A majority of the producers are within an hour of Triangle.”
North Carolina’s big poultry farms raise 1 billion birds each year. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, North Carolina produced more chicken by weight in 2021 (8 million pounds) than any other state.
Only around a quarter of big producers separate chicks by gender said Liz Turpin, a vice president at Targan. Turpin, who holds a Ph.D. in pathology, explained there are a few traditional ways to tell the gender of days-old chicks.
For certain breeds, sex is identifiable by their feathers. Another method is vent sexing, a discreet term for checking the chicks’ reproductive organs. Depending on gender, chicks are fed different amounts to optimize their size. Egg producers prize female layer chickens, and many kill the males.
This week, Turpin gave The News & Observer a tour of Targan’s new headquarters, including a look at the sexing and vaccination processors.
There was much she didn’t disclose for proprietary reasons — the speed of the conveyor belt, how far the chicks are separated, how precisely the high-speed cameras process what they capture.
But she did talk through the general process. Each chick enters the sexing machine from up high and slides down several levels on the conveyor belt — like a gentle ski slope. They are then analyzed, separated, and ultimately placed into a box with 99 other days-old chicks of the same gender.
Turpin said the system is faster and less crude than the traditional alternatives.
This story was originally published October 21, 2023 at 7:30 AM.
