Better Tech, Better Welfare

Over the last few decades, the animal breeding industry has achieved incredible things, selectively breeding farmed animals to grow faster, yield more, and feed a growing global population. But this rapid progress has come with a biological trade-off: an animal’s body can’t always keep up with its own growth. This can lead to unintended welfare issues, like skeletal weakness or joint pain, particularly in poultry. Modern breeders absolutely want to select for stronger, healthier, and more robust animals.

The bottleneck? You can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Selective breeding requires either an existing known link between a genotype and a desired phenotype or the ability to measure a phenotype or a proxy of a phenotype. Measuring health and welfare traits is key to breeding for health and welfare; this is our focus.

How tech is already making a difference

The good news is that we already know engineering can help solve this. New engineering solutions have already allowed breeders to select for health and welfare traits:

• The Lixiscope: Before this portable, low-dose X-ray came along, assessing bone health often meant guesswork or invasive procedures. Now, researchers and breeders can use lixiscopes to directly check bone density and skeletal integrity in real-time, completely painlessly. This has been an important driver behind the drastic reduction in leg defect rate over the past three decades.

• Pulse Oximetry: Pulse Oximetry is a non-invasive technology that measures blood oxygen saturation, a key indicator of cardiorespiratory health in fast-growing poultry. By allowing breeders to select against pulmonary hypertension, a condition leading to ascites, this tool has been credited with achieving a significant reduction in ascites in broiler flocks since 2000.

What we are trying to do

We want to build on these kinds of successes. We are an engineering consultancy, and we’re currently in the early, exploratory stages of a new mission: developing the next generation of phenotyping tools. We want to bridge the gap between animal welfare science and cutting-edge hardware to make health measurements even more accurate, accessible, and practical for the breeding industry.

We have a track record of developing and deploying new measurement technologies and scientific tools across other academic disciplines:

• Our team of mechanical, electronic, firmware, and software engineers already works with four of the world’s top ten Universities to develop new scientific tools for their research.
• We’re one of the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency’s partners, which sees us invent instruments for neurotech, robotics, climate monitoring, plant biology and more.
• We aren’t geneticists, but we’ve got a track record of partnering closely with scientific research groups to accelerate their research. Our model is to partner with experts in a field to support their research.

We’re looking to build the tools that geneticists and breeders need to measure the hard-to-measure traits. We believe that by advancing phenotyping technology, we can support industry to breed naturally healthier, more robust animals. We’re early in the process of testing our hypothesis that there are missing technologies for phenotyping. To test this hypothesis, we are:

• Speaking to welfare scientists. We’re not the experts in animal health and breeding; we want to support other people’s research and need to find the scientists to learn from and partner with.
• Exploring which diseases and welfare traits are particularly hard to measure - are there any targets we should be immediately focusing on?
• Learning about others already working on this. Are there teams already addressing this problem, and should we support their work rather than launching our own programmes?

If you’re an animal welfare scientist, geneticist, or other expert in the field, then we’d love to connect with you and hear about the measurement and breeding challenges that you currently face.