Source:Tom Johnston, MEATINGPLACE, 4/5/19


McDonald’s Corp. and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) have teamed to launch a $4 million research initiative to develop and commercialize automated monitoring tools that can quantitatively assess key animal welfare indicators in broiler chickens.

Unlike existing methods that rely on human observation and subjective scoring, the SMART (Sensors, Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technologies) Broiler program aims to identify technological solutions that can objectively collect information on, for example, broilers’ walking ability and behavior across the supply chain.

The program will be tested in McDonald’s suppliers’ commercial broiler facilities to encourage wide-scale adoption. These tools could improve welfare for 9 billion birds in the U.S. and more than 20 billion worldwide per year.

The SMART Broiler program is now accepting applications to the program.

SMART Broiler grants will be awarded in two phases to multiple, cross-disciplinary teams. The research objective is to rapidly develop the hardware components, data management and analytics necessary to assess broiler chicken welfare on the farm. The initial funding phase will award a maximum of four grants, each receiving up to $500,000. SMART Broiler phase I is currently accepting pre-proposals until June 5. The SMART Broiler website includes information about applying for these grants.

During the second research phase, those awardees whose technology solutions demonstrated promise and delivered value will receive up to $1 million in additional funding to continue to refine and validate their technologies. The end goal of the program is to develop commercially feasible tools that can deployed worldwide.

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