The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) and the McDonald’s Corporation funds the research and development of broiler welfare monitoring technologies via its SMART Broiler program.
Large scale adoption of this kind of technology does not just increase animal welfare, it can also improve efficiency and profitability.
“The commercial broiler industry raises billions of chickens annually for meat,” said Nikki Dutta, scientific program officer, Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research. “Given the size and scale of these facilities, implementing SMART technologies on a large scale could significantly enhance farm management, profitability and animal health and welfare. It could also offer farmers more operational flexibility by allowing them to monitor their flocks remotely while away from their farms.”
Nikki Dutta will be a speaker at the 2025 Chicken Marketing Summit. Registration is now open.
What is SMART Broiler?
Created by congress, FFAR invests in agricultural research and requires every federal dollar to be matched by private sector investment.
FFAR partnered with McDonald’s in 2019 to establish the SMART Broiler program to invest in Sensors, Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technologies (SMART) which track key broiler welfare indicators such as gait, vocalizations and behavior in real time, according to Dutta.
The program has awarded $5.5 million to nine projects.
How can SMART technologies improve chicken production?
Monitoring broiler behavior can help producers and farmers directly address the specific needs of the birds, improving the health of the flock.
“Healthy flocks have better feed conversion, are more productive and require fewer health interventions, like targeted antibiotic use, thus increasing farm profitability,” said Dutta.
What’s next for the SMART Broiler program?
Some of the projects are currently being tested in commercial broiler farms to see how they perform in large scale operations, according to Dutta, and FFAR is also requesting proposals to evaluate the impact of the program.
Attend the 2025 Chicken Marketing Summit
The 2025 Chicken Marketing Summit will be held at the DeSoto Savannah in Savannah, Georgia, on July 28-30, 2025. This one-of-a-kind event will feature two content tracks. The first will focus on consumers and how technology impacts them, while the second will look at the impact new technologies have from an operational standpoint for chicken companies, retail and foodservice.
Serving a unique cross-section of the chicken supply chain, the Chicken Marketing Summit explores issues and trends in food marketing and consumer chicken consumption patterns and purchasing behavior.
Registration is now open.
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