Yann Le Pottier, managing director at Grimaud Frères, spoke to The Poultry Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the 2026 International Production and Processing Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA about how the waterfowl industry can stay competitive and sustainable and how emerging technologies are impacting their genetics.
Yann, tell us about Grimaud Frères.
Our company is dedicated to genetic selection and breeding of different species of waterfowls, like ducks and geese, as well as guinea fowls and pigeons for meat. The company is now more than 60 years old, and we supply the market all over the world.
What’s the most critical change the global waterfowl industry must make in the next decade to stay competitive and sustainable?
One of the key points for the future is to keep a good sanitary level of the products. Of course, the birds but the meat at the end for the consumer will always be a key point that we’ll have to improve if possible, or to maintain at least.
Second, we need to have good production costs to maintain the low cost, otherwise the consumer will escape from our products. For any product, it must be acceptable at the price point for the consumer to buy it. Those are certainly the two key points that we have to keep in mind for the next decades.
On top of that, I would say that we need to listen to what the consumer demands. They may ask for a different portion size or presentation, so the industry will have to work on listening to the market now and the next decades.
I’ve heard a lot of people talk at this show about labor being a big issue. Is that an issue in the waterfowl industry?
Yes, this is an issue in North America. Our company is based in Europe, specifically in France, and the issue is the same. We have good people who are retiring with a lot of knowledge, so we always must train the younger generation.
It’s not easy to bring them to our market and our business, but agriculture makes sense to most people finally when they enter this business. We have the opportunity to sell our products and activity and to attract new talent. Every day, we see what we produce, and sometimes that’s better than the internet or things like that, so I believe in the future of this industry and the younger generation.
With volatility now a constant, from feed costs to disease to geopolitics, how should waterfowl producers rethink long-term planning?
A different topic in your question about feed volatility, that’s true and raw materials are quite low today for the feed, but they can increase suddenly. Our job is to continuously improve the feed conversion ratio (FCR) of the meat our clients are producing, so we have to continue to work massively on improving the FCR.
About sanitary questions, as I said from the beginning, it’s a key point. There was a question about bird flu today for all poultry, ducks are especially concerned when it comes to avian influenza.
We have a solution on bird flu with the vaccination. When we have a virus for humans, for any animals, the vaccine is a solution. In France, we are using vaccination against bird flu, and this is important because we’ll never stop the virus. I believe this is something that will come out also in North America in the long term.
On geopolitics, I don’t know what the future will be, but what we have to do as a company along with some of our colleagues is to stay close to our clients and to set up a GP (grandparent) farm close to our market. Whenever something happens with geopolitics, with Europe, Asia or wherever, if we have a presence locally, like we have in North America, we can be close and keep proximity with our clients and keep the business progressing at the same time. It’s a solution, but not a political answer to the geopolitical movement.
Sustainability today goes beyond carbon metrics. What role should primary breeders play in driving meaningful outcomes across the poultry value chain?
Carbon trace is a big topic, and we have to monitor it. One of the major goals for genetic companies is to improve the carbon trace by improving FCR, for example, because less feed consumed for one kilo of meat produced saves carbon.
Genetically, we can improve all the criteria on the rusticity of birds and even on egg production of the breeders can also save some carbon. A genetic company and a breeding company have key roles to play on this topic. For the past decades, genetic companies brought a lot against carbon trace, and the future will be the same.
Which emerging technologies or data driven tools do you believe will have the greatest impact on waterfowl performance in the coming years?
There are many of them, but the one I would emphasize is, for example, we are using a medical CT scan to improve our breeds. Every duck we are selecting, on a pedigree level only, goes through a CT scan to have a full image of the body composition, including the meat and bone compositions. It’s really a rupture that we implemented 10 years ago, and we are improving that by having new CT scanners arriving in the company in March 2026. For rusticity of the birds, by having good bone formation and good bone capacity, we are definitely improving.
The second technology is how we improve the feed conversion ratio (FCR). We use the FIRE (Frequency Identification Radio Equipment) system. All animals at pedigree level are equipped with FIRE tags (at leg or wing) at they are identified at each visit to the feeder system. For every bird, we know when they go to eat, what they did eat, how long they eat, and their quantity per meal. We can improve FCR using this type of fully accurate data. Understanding and gathering data on FCR is important for production costs and carbon topics.
The last and the most important one is all our work on genomics. Genomics has existed in cattle for 20 to 30 years, in pigs for 20 years, and on chickens for more than 10 years. It has also been available for ducks for the last three to four years.
We started using this technology from the beginning – truly as soon as the DNA of the ducks was discovered. Using genomics, we can improve all the criteria by only serum blood samples, and it’s really impressive. We will not stop the other measures, but it opens the door for increased improvement.
The most important one measure is how to improve egg production on the line with the female and male, but the male also brings genetic improvements. How to improve egg production on the male is only through genomics that we can measure the potential egg production of a male just by blood sample. That’s a lot of fun and there is a lot of improvement to come on the genetic level with the new technology now available to us.
What is your point of view on animal welfare, and what are your actions and developments on that topic?
Yes, society is waiting a lot on an animal welfare point of view. We are working on that but are not alone. We are working at the selection level, but for example, we work a lot with one of the US companies that is helping us with improving the treatment. We are practicing on the day-old birds, like ducks, we need to apply some beak treatment or claw treatment to avoid some problems on the animals when they grow. Now, instead of making beak or claw trimming, which is harmful for the birds, we have treatment by an infrared system. We didn’t develop this, but we work with Nova-Tech in the US to help us to develop it for ducks.
Another big action we implemented in France is the in ovo sexing technology. It’s specific to some types of ducks such as the Mule ducks or the Muscovy ducks that also exist in North America but are used much more in Europe. In those productions, we are not using many the female of this Muscovy and Mule ducks. Two years ago, we developed and implemented the application of in ovo sexing in the hatchery. At hatching, we have only males. In ovo technology also is used in layer market, not in our company, but this is what we have been able to do with our product, the ducks, with the in ovo-sexing. Probably some other answers later, but the main ones – the treatment on the day-old birds and in ovo sexing – we are proud of using new technologies that were not available even 10 years ago.
Looking to 2035, what does success look like for the waterfowl industry, and what responsibility do industry leaders carry in achieving that?
I will come back to the topic of bird flu, which is a concern for ducks. To me, vaccination is something that will have to be implemented in the future to save a lot of production and to save disaster for some farmers sometime in the coming 10 years is my guess.
I believe we will vaccinate much more than ducks, probably layers and maybe turkeys which are birds that are quite sensitive to bird flu. We will do this to save the neighbor’s production like chicken operations, which is much less sensitive, but also the dairy cows – it’s something we hear about in North America.
Another change is improving our production costs by improving FCR, but also the rusticity of the birds, the good conformation and bone composition. All these topics are especially important and take care of the carbon, take care of animal welfare. We have to manage and to take care of these issues because it’s our responsibility for all companies present here to work on all these topics.
Your company is also an actor in guinea fowls and pigeon industry. As you indicated to us in the introduction, what are the challenges and the perspectives for these species?
The challenges are similar in terms of production cost and sanitary things. For all our breeds, like ducks, geese and the guinea fowls and pigeons, we cannot copy the chicken for our breed. We have to maintain the difference, meaning the different characteristics of the meat in terms of quality, but also taste. For us, we must take care to maintain this different taste – this particularity of the guinea fowls. We supply the guinea fowls to one of our clients in Pennsylvania. They love the quality of meat, which is lean and tasty.
The same with pigeons that we supply in Canada. One of our pigeons replaces two pigeons that were produced before because there is a lot of meat on our pigeons. This means better productivity, but also good quality for the consumers while always keeping the flavor. This is our concern for all our sector behind us. We are taking care of that on top of everything else, but we just don’t want to copy chicken. We want to be different – to propose something different than the just chicken. Even though I love chicken, nothing against chicken, the consumer needs to have a different choice. We are here for that, to propose that to the farmer and to the consumer.
AUTHOR : SARAH MIKESELL