By Marian Stamp Dawkins, FRS CBE
University of Oxford, UK
Does improving poultry welfare result in a cost to farmers, or is it the key to healthier and more profitable farming?
Better welfare can lead to production advantages such as reduced mortality, less disease and lower medication use. There are also hidden advantages that are more difficult to quantify, such as greater staff satisfaction and the ability to reassure customers about the welfare standards being achieved.
The cost of welfare
But improving poultry welfare is not without expense. For example, welfare improvements like bales and perches cost money. Additionally, they can be difficult to clean, take up floor space and get in the way of inspection and clearance. Reducing stocking density or using slower-growing breeds are even clearer examples of welfare improvements that can prove seriously uneconomic. Welfare may be a desirable goal, but someone has to pay for it.
With the new agri-tech equipment now available, financial questions have become even more pressing. There is potential for a range of benefits, from reduced labor costs and improved production efficiency to higher animal welfare standards. Cameras, sound, motion and detectors that record all aspects of an animal’s health and behavior are presented as “must-haves” for today’s farmers.
But are they really a must-have? A 2024 McKinsey report based on farmers’ views of agri-tech identified several reasons why farmers remain cautious about adopting smart-farming equipment. Difficulty of installation and challenges with use were mentioned as obstacles. But by far the most important reason was that many farmers are not yet convinced they will obtain a financial return on the considerable investment often involved.
Fulfilled potential?
A weakness of agri-tech is that it promises much but has not yet demonstrated sufficient returns on investment, at least not enough to convince many farmers. This weakness is made worse when agri-tech’s main or only selling point is that it improves animal welfare. It follows that if agri-tech aimed at improving chicken welfare is to be widely adopted by the poultry industry, there needs to be much better evidence that it not only improves chicken welfare but also offers real financial advantages.
The bottom line for all agri-tech is that it improves efficiency. The bottom line for welfare-related agri-tech is that it improves poultry welfare and efficiency.
The real test of the economic and welfare value of new smart-farming technology will come when it is widely used, and everyone can see its advantages and disadvantages in the real world. But in the meantime — when understandable caution stands in the way of its widespread use — there is much more that academic researchers, equipment sellers and producers themselves can do together to demonstrate the links between improved chicken welfare and increased profitability.
Testing the technology
Small-scale pen trials are, of course, an essential first stage in the development of any new technology. They establish its potential and identify what needs to be developed next.
But what works for a few tens or hundreds of chickens in a carefully controlled environment does not necessarily translate into what happens when many thousands of birds are reared on commercial farms. Not only environmental but also financial conditions are completely different, meaning that both welfare and efficiency outcomes may also be quite different.
It follows that for farmers to be convinced of the value of new technology, there must be more farm-scale trials that demonstrate its value, not just to the animals and their welfare but also to the farm balance sheet.
For example, a major problem with adopting welfare-related technology is that many farmers are suspicious of any suggested changes that involve the birds becoming active and performing more of their natural behavior — the very features that are often used to define “good welfare.” More active birds eat more, and because feed is the largest single factor in broiler production, farmers are justifiably wary of anything that increases how much birds eat. Only data collected from commercial broiler farms can show whether their suspicions are justified.
Collecting data
As one of the participants in the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research SMART Broiler program, we recently took a step toward doing this. We used smart cameras to measure the activity levels of 34 flocks of broilers on a commercial farm throughout their lives. We correlated this with one of the most important measures of production efficiency: feed-conversion ratio (FCR). We found that on several measures of “activity,” the most active flocks also delivered the lowest FCR.
Our suggested explanation is that the most active flocks had lower mortality levels, and that their improved FCR was due to their greater liveability. The less active flocks may have eaten less, but they also seemed to have a higher mortality risk, so everything they ate would be wasted.
There were many limitations to this study. First, it was correlational, and it is well known that correlation is not causation. Also, the study was conducted on one breed (Cobb) on a farm with a range of lighting regimes (gradient, natural, overhead, etc.), which is likely to have altered the birds’ activity.
So, it does not follow that whenever broiler activity increases, FCR will decrease. And it certainly does not entitle us to conclude that all welfare improvements — however caused and with whatever management procedures are in place — will be associated with an increase in production efficiency.
But what it does show is that increased activity and better FCR are not necessarily the incompatible goals they might seem. There can be “sweet spots” where both can be achieved at once. Agri-tech can help us identify combinations of enrichments and management that enable us to find these sweet spots but only if it is sufficiently deployed on commercial farms where the full economic costs and benefits can be evaluated.
The study results mentioned in this article have been published in Poultry Science. Access the paper here.
Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
