Co-designed Welfare Monitoring Platform for Pig and Dairy Cattle

Project Information

ClearFarm

Grant agreement ID: 862919

DOI

10.3030/862919

Project closed

EC signature date 17 September 2019

Start date 1 October 2019

End date 31 March 2024

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine, maritime and inland water research, and the bioeconomy

Total cost

€ 6 581 670,64

EU contribution

€ 5 899 105,63

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ClearFarm (Co-designed Welfare Monitoring Platform for Pig and Dairy Cattle)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Animal welfare has become a fundamental aspect of modern livestock production as citizens in Europe and elsewhere demand that animals are reared, transported and slaughtered as humanely as possible. Animal welfare is first and foremost an ethical issue derived from the fact that animals are sentient beings. Also, improving farm animal welfare has positive effects on human health. Important as it is, however, animal welfare should not be seen as an stand-alone issue, but in relationship with other societal concerns, including environmental issues.

If farm animal welfare is to make a significant progress, we need to have scientifically validated systems to assess the welfare of animals. These assessment systems shall provide reliable information to consumers so that they can make informed choices when buying animal foods and, ideally, information on animal welfare and on the environmental impact of farming should be combined.

In this context, the ClearFarn project developed and validated a system to assess the welfare of pigs and dairy cattle using information that can be automatically gathered on the production farms and with a particular focus on welfare issues that have an impact on the environment. We also validated, under controlled conditions, the use of existing sensors to identify the welfare status of pigs (welfare indicators). DOL supplied the instrumentation and the data infrastructure.



The personnel cost has suffered deviations from the requested budget for several reasons:

• The first of them is due to the successive change of technical personnel attributed to the project, who, either due to personal decisions or business decisions, have been replaced on four occasions during the execution of the project.
• Secondly, the increases in salary costs are due in part to updates to the company's collective agreements since the beginning of the project.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We have gathered information on stakeholders’ views on the risks of using automatically recorded information to assess farm animal welfare. Our results indicate that stakeholders have a positive view but perceive some risks such as an increase in industrialization of farming, and the concern that such information is vulnerable to misuse and cyber-crime.

We have also reviewed the existing validated and commercially available technologies that could be used for sensor-based welfare assessment in dairy cattle and pigs. Our findings show that existing technologies are potential tools for on-farm animal welfare assessment. However, validation studies are lacking for many of them and there is a need to identify technologies to assess the animals' affective states or emotions, both positive and negative.

We performed twelve trials on pig and dairy farms for one and a half years to validate several automatic recording systems. In the case of pigs, work has included automatic feeding stations that record feeding behaviour of pigs, automatic recording of play behaviour as a positive welfare indicator and automatic recording of pig vocalizations. In dairy cattle, automatic recordings of cows’ activity have been compared with the results of in situ welfare assessment as well as with performance and biochemical parameters. We collected data on the environmental impact of pig and dairy farming using life cycle analysis and bioeconomic models developed within the project.

Finally, we have developed the ClearFarm platform and have investigated business opportunities for the exploitation of ClearFarm technologies.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The results of our on-farm trials suggest that animal welfare can be monitored using PLF data from sensors in pig and dairy cattle farms. The information from these technologies, if appropriately integrated, bring an unprecedented level of understanding of the status of farm animals at an individual (cows) and group (pigs) level. The platform that will arise from ClearFarm is expected to assess in a feasible and valid way the welfare of pigs and dairy cattle using automatically recorded information.

The ClearFarm platform, that is available to dairy cattle stakeholders, opens a new era on animal farming, improving transparency. Information gathered from different sensors into a single platform facilitates a horizontal understanding of animal welfare across the different domains. This information, if available to farmers will also help decision making, assisting farmers in identifying problems when they appear, that will empower farmers and improve the efficiency and transparency of their businesses.

The information from the platform, will also be a valuable tool for European consumers, increasing the transparency of the livestock sector, and improving trust to consumers. PLF technologies can provide a unique reliable and objective information that can be used to improve the consumer acceptance, therefore, increasing the willingness to pay for food that is being produced under high welfare standards.

Finally, the availability of a platform that centralises animal welfare information is an important asset for policy makers, as it can be used as a centralised knowledge platform that can be used for benchmarking and control purposes.

In conclusion, ClearFarm is the first digital platform integrating animal welfare information that can be utilised for different usages. However, to achieve the highest impact, it should be now implemented by operating companies. To facilitate this, the ClearFarm consortium has opened the knowledge to companies willing to implement it.

Project infographic

ClearFarm team

Farm trial in WP3

ClearFarm Kick-off meeting