A Turkish farmer believes his rooster could be worth millions after discovering it had started laying eggs.

Every year, unwanted male chicks are killed as they are economically unviable in comparison with hens who can also produce eggs while being raised.

It is estimated that 7 billion male chicks are culled per year but farmer Adnan Akar, who was amazed when he found it was his cockerel that was laying rather small eggs, believes the solution to the killing of all of these male chicks could be egg-laying roosters.

He said that admittedly the rooster eggs are currently smaller than chicken eggs, but says that the mere fact that a cockerel laying eggs exists at all opens enormous possibilities for further developing a business with the egg-laying cockerels, which he believes could be worth millions in the future.

The farmer says he been carefully checking his poultry on his farm near the district of Bodrum in the Turkish province of Mugla after he started feeding them on a special diet provided with material left over from another firm nearby making herbal products.

He was carefully checking the eggs made from eating the herbal product leftovers, which included making sure the chickens didn’t have any other type of food, and was surprised when he found a noticeably smaller egg.

He wanted to isolate which chicken which had laid the egg and was amazed when he found that it was a rooster.

He said that he had heard stories that roosters can sometimes lay eggs shortly before dying, and also heard local folk legends that a rooster laying an egg was supposed to indicate that important news was about to arrive.

However, despite the stories, he admitted this was the first time he’d experienced it, and instead of it being only egg, he found that the rooster was regularly laying them.

At the time of writing, Adnan said he had received six eggs from the rooster.

He said: “The rooster egg is significantly smaller and lighter than a regular egg, and it is non-fertilised, and it doesn’t have a yoke.”

They will continue with the experiment and monitor the number of eggs they get from the rooster, saying he hadn’t expected it to live long after the first leg and was amazed when they continued coming.

He added: “He doesn’t show any signs of dying at all as the legends say, so we will continue to watch to see how things develop.”

In a press release by the University of Edinburgh in 2010, they confirm the existence of chickens that are half male and half female.

In the report published in the journal Nature, they wrote: “It was previously thought that sex chromosomes in birds control whether a testis or ovary forms, with sexual traits then being determined by hormones.

“The researchers, however, identified differences between male and female cells that control the development of sexual traits. The scientists have named the phenomenon, cell-autonomous sex identity (CASI).”