Showcase

Sensor technology for sustainable breeding

Sensor technology offers interesting opportunities to record traits related to animal health and behaviour, but there is still a lot of research to be done on how we can use these sensors and analyse the data.

Case study 1: automated broiler phenotyping

The Public-Private Partnership (PPP) “Automated broiler phenotyping using smart technologies to improve health, welfare and performance” is a good example of how our research aims to bridge the gap between knowledge and practice by delivering practical, implementable outcomes. The aim of this PPP is to implement automatic approaches for phenotyping activity, leg health and body weight in broilers, as current developments in new technologies provide increased possibilities for using sensor and computer vision approaches to phenotype these traits on individual animals in a breeding program.

Smart technologies to phenotype individual animals

“Currently, manual recordings or visual observations still form the basis of a large part of of the phenotypic records that are routinely collected in broiler breeding programs,” says Esther Ellen, project leader and deputy head of the Animal Breeding and Genomics Group (ABG) of Wageningen University & Research (WUR). “However, these records can be time-consuming to collect, as well as subjective. Smart technologies (e.g. computer vision and radio frequency identification) can aid in automatically monitoring health, welfare and performance of individual broilers on a larger scale. However, before implementing these new technologies in practice, we first need to develop tools that can extract relevant, reliable information on individual animal traits automatically.”

Through the development of these automated recording tools, phenotyping will become more time-efficient, objective and accurate, and can be performed continuously, throughout life, in contrast to recording it only once at a certain age.

Bridging the gap between knowledge and practice

The collaboration between the parties from the agrifood sector and the researchers from ABG ensures that the recording tools can be tested in a practical situation. “It’s important to make sure that the automated approaches are suitable for practical environments and that the resulting phenotypical information has potential for immediate implementation,” says Esther. The phenotypical information will help the broiler breeding industry to improve the health, welfare and performance of their animals.