Technology has an increasingly important role to play in maintaining the balance between welfare and efficiency, and poultry farmers will need to continue to adapt and harness its benefits as they navigate the opportunities and challenges ahead.
There are 3 key challenges for the UK broiler industry as it enters 2025. Firstly, last autumn’s budget, including changes to inheritance tax rules, caused significant concern for many farming businesses. For poultry farmers specifically, the threat of avian influenza (AI) looms, particularly during winter and, thirdly, the move to lower bird stocking densities will require careful management throughout the supply chain.
As highlighted in MSD Animal Health UK’s ‘Time for Tech’ white paper, precision livestock farming technologies are pivotal in delivering incremental improvements across the supply chain, from better animal health and welfare to more consistent outputs and reduced resource use. The starting point for the industry is good; the UK, and the EU in general, are world leaders in their standards for growing chickens with regard to technology, poultry shed conditions as well as bird husbandry.
Avian influenza and early alerts
There have been positive cases of avian influenza in wild birds this winter season, with outbreaks on commercial farms in Norfolk and the East Riding of Yorkshire, prompting the declaration of a regional avian influenza prevention zone with mandatory housing measures in affected areas. The risk will remain until spring, so farmers must continue to focus on biosecurity and ensure good practice remains top of mind among staff.
Environmental monitoring technology in broiler sheds can help minimise the impact of disease outbreaks by providing early alerts. Having detailed real-time sensory information coming from your shed means you are able to sooner pick up if there are any deviations from the norm, in particular, water intake. A significant drop in water intake often signals disease, assuming environmental parameters haven’t changed.
The SenseHub Poultry system digitally records water intake every hour, which could help limit the potential risks to other farms; if you know there’s something amiss on your farm sooner, then the premises can be placed under restrictions earlier. For any production disease, interventions can be quickly put in place to minimise the impact on bird health, welfare and performance.
Lower stocking densities
Moving to a lower stocking density is a major topic of discussion across the sector and it will be interesting to see how the market deals with it over the coming year. Transitioning to 30kg per square metre – a 20% reduction – takes at least 6 months per farm. Many retailers have already transitioned and eventually all retailers are likely to follow suit, but challenges include sourcing new growers and building new sheds to maintain supply volumes, which is often hampered by UK planning processes.
Feelings are mixed among farmers, with some looking forward to reducing stocking density and others uncertain of what it will bring. There is a perception that it will be easier to manage birds because there will be fewer of them in the same space, with less pressure on feed pans, drinker lines and litter, with less moisture in the shed and less CO2 being produced. That’s true to an extent, but bird management principles remain the same, from pre-heating to brooding and environmental control. In fact, extra vigilance and precision will be needed because each individual bird will be worth more, because farmers are paid on the total weight of birds leaving the farm and there will be fewer birds in each shed.
The price per kilogramme must reflect the bird’s increased value to keep farmers profitable as costs rise and margins narrow, at least in the short term. We don’t yet know what will happen – perhaps, in time, the customer is going to have to pay for it, but it could be that the customer, the retailer, and the farmer all pay between them. This is merely speculation but, however the supply chain deals with it, it is vital to protect the health and welfare of every bird.
Keeping food affordable
Maintaining production efficiency will be key to ensuring chicken also remains affordable to the consumer, while continuing to meet higher health and welfare demands. Using more advanced monitoring technology brings benefits again here, giving farmers more in-depth information and greater precision to help them ensure optimal conditions in their sheds, even as stocking density decreases.
Poultry farmers have already made significant strides in reducing antibiotic use over the past decade, driven by improvements in creating optimal environments. Maintaining birds in the thermal neutral zone, implementing disease vaccination programmes, and minimising stress all support healthy broiler development, including stronger immune systems.
Food safety issues – the key pathogens being salmonella and campylobacter – as well as welfare issues such as podo dermatitis and hock burn, can all effectively be managed by greater control of meeting birds’ fundamental needs, maintaining pathogen-unfavourable environments, and ensuring appropriate litter conditions.
‘Factory farming’ fears
While technology will help farmers continue to enhance welfare and sustainability, we need to be cognisant of consumer fears and perceptions of ‘factory farming’ linked to increased use of precision livestock farming technology. The message should be that we are not intensifying farming. Instead, information gathered by new technology extends the farmer’s reach, enabling them to see what’s happening right down at bird-level, offering insights across every square foot to create optimal conditions.
Farmer attitudes to tech
There are also common questions asked by farmers and farm managers about what new technology involves. The first question is often: will this replace some of the people we have working on-farm? The second, about in-shed monitoring systems, is: will they control the shed? The answer to both is ‘no’. Monitoring systems like these work independently of shed controller systems. The data is there to empower farmers to make prompt and informed management decisions. On older farms, owners tend to know where issues lie, with non-airtight sheds for example, sensory data can pinpoint and quantify that. Fixing these structural issues delivers immediate benefits, and data can then be used to fine-tune the birds’ environment.
Similarly, for sheds under 10 years old, where conditions are already good and bird performance is strong, the benefit of precision monitoring is that they can tweak environmental management to even out gentle peaks and troughs in performance. Providing greater consistency benefits farmers, for example through improved food conversion ratios and supports their processors aiming for target carcass weight ranges. By improving flock uniformity and reducing deviations in weight, integrators can optimise processing efficiency, enhance plant utilisation, and deliver consistent, high-quality products to customers.
In all cases, good stockmanship remains the priority. Unless somebody does something with the information, it’s just information and we don’t gain improvements. It is important to bring farmers along the journey and fully explain how technology works with their existing set-up, to ensure they feel comfortable with it as a valuable tool to improve the welfare, efficiency and profitability of their business.