The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research and McDonald’s Corp. are investing an additional $671,481 in two SMART Broiler research projects seeking to improve the welfare and production of broiler chickens through precision monitoring technologies.

Traditional welfare assessments struggle to keep pace with farms housing up to 50,000 birds per house. The Sensors, Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technologies solutions augment traditional human observation and subjective scoring with objective real-time monitoring by automating and tracking key welfare indicators — like gait, vocalization and behavior. The technology is being tested on farms in the United States, Hungary, Northern Ireland and Poland to support widespread adoption.

In 2019, FFAR and McDonald’s launched the SMART Broiler program, a public-private partnership investing $4 million in two phases of research grants to develop technology to objectively monitor chicken welfare on commercial farms. In Phase I, six projects received a total of more than $2.1 million to test and refine potential solutions. The second phase of the program is advancing compelling research from Phase I for large-scale adoption by providing additional funding to bring these innovations to market.

Another SMART Broiler Phase II awardee receiving additional investment is Marian Dawkins with the University of Oxford, receiving $271,865 to extend testing of a novel camera and computer system called Opticflock. The system automatically monitors the behaviors of broiler chicken flocks around the clock to deliver real-time information on key welfare indicators such as mortality, walking ability, leg health and infection. The tool uses commercially available closed-circuit television cameras linked to small on-farm computers.

The other SMART Broiler Phase II awardee receiving additional investment is Niamh O’Connell with Queen’s University Belfast, receiving $399,616 to transfer intelligent surveillance techniques for tracking humans to provide real-time monitoring of individual birds within a flock. This camera-based technology, called FlockFocus, can automatically monitor and track activity patterns and the weight of individual birds within large flocks on commercial farms. It can also monitor feeding behavior and the distribution of birds in key areas of the chicken house. 

Source: Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research