Facilitating Learning Opportunities, Cultivating Knowledge and Welfare through Integrated Sensing and Expertise (FLOCKWISE): A novel technology for welfare-led productivity gains in laying hen farming.

Today's markets form a very challenging environment for egg farmers. Due to soaring costs, including feed and electricity, many have left the industry, and this has led to recent UK-wide egg shortages. Farmers are also under increasing pressure to improve and report on the environmental and ethical (including animal welfare) impact of farming. Furthermore, there are emerging and moving disease challenges, such as avian influenza (bird flu), shifts in market dynamics and changes in chicken breeds that require different welfare and husbandry requirements. This project will transform FAI's existing flock management system BirdBox to develop **Facilitating Learning Opportunities, Cultivating Knowledge and Welfare through Integrated Sensing and Expertise (FLOCKWISE)** which will use state-of-the-art sensors to continuously monitor the birds and their environment, and use artificial intelligence to learn about the best management practices to support farmers with targeted guidance to address these significant challenges. **FLOCKWISE** will incorporate novel sound recording to understand chicken vocalisations as well as egg quality data collected from the factory to detect health and welfare problems in real-time. Using these novel measures of welfare and data collected by commercial farmers, we will build a community learning tool. The tool iteratively identifies which interventions work to reduce the most problematic welfare challenges on farm, supporting farmers to achieve higher health, welfare, and productivity in their flocks, whilst improving resource use, reducing environmental impact and carbon footprint of the cage-free laying industry. This ambitious project is feasible because it builds on an existing and successful collaboration between FAI, Newcastle University, and The Lakes Free Range Egg Company and brings in new partners, CIEL and Argi-EPI, and a steering group from across the supply chain to further capacity and reach. The team provides a unique combination of practical experience of egg farming, supply chain knowledge, alongside cutting-edge research expertise in animal welfare, machine learning and social science, which has the potential to dramatically improve both hen health and welfare, egg farm profitability, and environmental impact of laying hen farming in the near future.