Smart farming & artificial intelligence: how can we ensure that animal welfare is a priority?

24 March 2025

Technology is revolutionising animal welfare, particularly in smart farming, where artificial intelligence and data-driven solutions could help optimise conditions for farm animals. Marian Stamp Dawkins, SMART Broiler Grantee, and Emeritus Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Oxford explores how these innovations can successfully translate into meaningful improvements in animal welfare. Work that has just recently benefited from a further grant from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) and McDonald’s Corporation.

How Can Technology Improve Animal Welfare?

Smart farming, including applications of artificial intelligence (AI), has the potential to improve farm animal welfare in many ways. Whether or not this potential for improved welfare is achieved in practice, however, will depend on several external factors, in particular, whether the public and producers are satisfied that smart farming can really capture what they mean by “good welfare” and whether the new technology actually does deliver on its promises and result in demonstrable improvements in animal welfare. Above all, the adoption of the new technology will depend on the cost implications for farmers. When technology to improve welfare also delivers financial benefits, better welfare can be seen as part of a commercially viable strategy for improved efficiency, environmental impact and healthier food. However, where investment in new welfare technology does not pay for itself in terms of improved efficiency, then other business models will be needed to persuade farmers to use it.

What is Smart Farming?

“Smart” (sometimes called “precision”) farming is a blanket term that covers a range of different techniques that use computers in agriculture and can be considered under three headings:

  • Using sensors at individual or group level to provide information about production, welfare, health and disease outcomes, environmental variables etc. thus replacing or supplementing measurements currently made by auditors, veterinary or farm staff.
  • Understanding the dynamic spread of disease both within and between farms (epidemiology) and collecting evidence on what makes for ‘best practice’ for achieving optimum, welfare and production outcomes.
  • Using computer-based decision-making and targeted interventions at all levels from management decisions to decisions at the level of groups or individual animals.

How could smart farming improve farm animal welfare?

Marian Stamp Dawkins, FRS CBE, says

“With the combination of one or more of these approaches, technology has the potential to optimize living conditions for animals, save labour costs, detect and treat disease at an early stage, minimize waste and lead to higher farm incomes. Properly implemented, it could lead to genuine improvements in animal welfare, resulting in animals having healthier environments and new opportunities to do behaviour that is important to them.”

Some examples of how smart farming could help include:

  • On-farm 24/7 monitoring of welfare to ensure high standards of welfare and early warning of problems
  • Higher welfare standards on commercial farms
  • More focus on the welfare needs of individual animals.
  • Greater understanding of what animals choose and what they choose to avoid, leading to a more animal-centered view of welfare.
  • Greater understanding of the body language of animals and how they express both positive and negative affective state
  • Improved ability to validate welfare indicators through the ability to include more data and a greater number of variables,
  • Cross-farm comparisons to reveal ‘best practice’
  • Cross-farm comparisons to reveal causes of disease and welfare problems
  • Lifelong provision of optimal welfare conditions, based on cross-farm comparisons.

By embracing smart farming technology, the farming industry has a unique opportunity to prioritise animal welfare, ensuring that innovation not only boosts efficiency but also leads to healthier, happier animals.

In support of this the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) and McDonald’s Corporation last week announced an additional $671,481 investment in two SMART Broiler research projects including Marian's, which are seeking to transform 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 (SMART) solutions augment traditional human observation and subjective scoring with objective real-time monitoring by automating and tracking key welfare indicators — like gait, vocalization and behaviour. 

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 $2,092,439 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.

“Through the commercialization and scale of SMART Broiler solutions, McDonald’s and integrators alike can anticipate improvements to their key welfare indicators and overall progress towards their respective animal welfare initiatives,” said Janet Helms, McDonalds’ global sustainable sourcing animal health & welfare senior manager. “The ability to accurately measure and demonstrate improvement in welfare and behavioural outcomes becomes a potential differentiator in a commodity market”

Marian Dawkins with the Department of Biology, along with Professor Stephen Roberts (Engineering Science), Professor Christl Donnelly (Statistics) and Dr. Stephen Ellwood (Biology), is receiving $271,865 to extend testing of a novel camera and computer system called OPTICFLOCK. The system automatically monitors the behaviours 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 inexpensive and commercially available closed-circuit television cameras linked to small on-farm computers.

SMART Broiler solutions benefit a wide variety of U.S. and international broiler industry stakeholders, with the primary beneficiaries being the chickens. Farmers also benefit because healthy flocks have better feed conversion and require fewer health interventions, like targeted antibiotic use, thus increasing profitability. Additionally, SMART Broiler technology could increase farmers’ peace of mind by allowing them to remotely monitor their flocks when away from their farms.

“Investing in precision agriculture research allows us to harness advanced technologies — like sensors, robotics and predictive analytics — to monitor animal welfare in real time, offering U.S. producers actionable insights for better farm management, profitability and animal health,” said Dr. Jasmine Bruno, FFAR scientific program director. “These new SMART solutions bring the best research from across the globe home, creating a win-win for U.S. farmers and flocks.

To further support the SMART Broiler program, Amazon Web Services, Inc. and Accenture provided program management, cloud services and technical consulting support to awardees. USPOULTRY also awarded $100,000 in sponsorship to the SMART Broiler program, demonstrating the strong support from the U.S. broiler industry for this initiative.

Read the rest of this article in the Feb. 2025 issue of Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

Learn More About Marian Dawkins’ Insights on How Technology Can Improve Animal Welfare in this Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNZ1bD41KEE

About the SMART Broiler Research Program & Dawkins’ Grants

In 2019, the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) and McDonald’s Corporation 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 worldwide. In Phase I, six projects received a total of $2,092,439 to test and refine potential solutions. From those six, three projects together received an additional $1.63 million in Phase II to refine and validate their technology and prepare for large-scale adoption. These finalists were then invited to apply for final funding to bring their innovations to market. Marian Dawkins received funding in Phase I and Phase II for her research entitled Opticflock: Automated Monitoring of Broiler Chicken Behavior that Prioritizes Animal Welfare.  

Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research 

The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) builds public-private partnerships to fund bold research addressing big food and agriculture challenges. FFAR was established in the 2014 Farm Bill to increase public agriculture research investments, fill knowledge gaps and complement the U.S. Department Agriculture’s research agenda. FFAR’s model matches federal funding from Congress with private funding, delivering a powerful return on taxpayer investment. Through collaboration and partnerships, FFAR advances actionable science benefiting farmers, consumers and the environment. 

McDonald’s

McDonald’s is the world’s leading global foodservice retailer with over 43,000 locations in over 100 countries. Approximately 95% of McDonald’s restaurants worldwide are owned and operated by independent local business owners.