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Flockfocus – Developing Automated Surveillance Tools to Safeguard Chicken Welfare 

Year Awarded  2025

FFAR award amount   $399,616

Location   Belfast, Northern Ireland

Program   SMART Broiler

Matching Funders   McDonald’s Corporation

Grantee Institution   Queen’s University Belfast

Existing methods for assessing animal welfare rely on human observation and subjective scoring which can be inaccurate and time consuming. This research provides additional funding from phase I of the SMART Broiler program to transfer intelligent surveillance techniques used for tracking humans to provide real time monitoring of individual birds within a flock. This camera-based technology, called FlockFocus, represents a significant improvement to monitoring technology currently available to the industry and has the potential for revolutionizing animal welfare in other sectors.

OpticFlock: Automated Monitoring of Chicken Behavior That Prioritizes Animal Welfare – Part II 

Year Awarded  2025

FFAR award amount   $271,865

Location   Oxford, United Kingdom

Program   SMART Broiler

Matching Funders   McDonald’s Corporation

Grantee Institution   University of Oxford

Existing methods for assessing animal welfare rely on human observation and subjective scoring which can be inaccurate and time consuming. This research provides additional funding from Phase I of the SMART Broiler program to refine and extend the testing of a novel camera and computer system called OPTICFLOCK to compare key welfare outcomes, including hockburn, foot pad lesions and lameness, in commercial flocks. Additionally, this project incorporates strategies to facilitate producer adoption of OPTICFLOCK technology.

Greenhouses in Transition Synergy Workshop 1 

Convening Event Garderen, Netherlands

Aerial view of a sprawling solar farm alongside wind turbines in a green landscape

WFO-AgMission™ Report: Global Young Farmers’ Consultation on Climate-Smart Agriculture 

FoodShot Global Challenge #4 Water GroundBreaker Prize (United Kingdom) 

Year Awarded  2024

Total award amount   80,000

Location   London, United Kingdom

Program   FoodShot Global Challenge

Matching Funders   Builders Initiative, FoodShot Global, The Rockefeller Foundation

Grantee Institution   ThinkAqua

FoodShot Global is a collaboration between venture funds, banks, corporations, universities and foundations to improve our food system. This research creates networked clusters around locally owned hubs that provide farmers with market access, inputs and technical support. The initiative addresses small-scale farmers’ needs by ensuring a ready market for tilapia, producing high-quality seed fish and reducing production costs by using fish feed from Black Soldier Fly larvae, which also serve as organic fertilizer.

AgMission™ Funds Global Youth Consultation to Co-Create Agricultural Solutions with Young Farmers 

Year Awarded  2024

FFAR award amount   $171,355

Total award amount   $342,710

Location   Rome, Italy

Program   AgMission

Matching Funders   McDonald’s and PepsiCo

Grantee Institution   World Farmers’ Organisation

This AgMission grants builds on the 2023 Global Producers’ Consultation resulting from the development and implementation of a novel farmer-driven methodology. This report was generated after consultation with U.S. and global producers to collect information about their needs and expectations. This new award expands on the 2023 report to support a new iteration, the Global Youth Consultation, focused specifically on young farmers.

AgMission™ Funds Global Youth Consultation to Co-Create Agricultural Solutions with Young Farmers 

High-throughput in-ovo sexing of chicken eggs using hyperspectral imaging & Raman spectroscopy 

Year Awarded  2023

Total award amount   $499,331

Location   De Klomp, The Netherlands

Program   Egg-Tech Prize

Matching Funders   Open Philanthropy

Grantee Institution   HatchTech Group

Commercially, chicks can only be sexed after they hatch, requiring producers to devote time and resources to incubating male chicks, only to cull them. This research team is using molecular imaging technology to develop a commercially applicable optical technique for sexing hatching eggs by extracting and analyzing small droplets of the embryos’ fluid at the eighth day of incubation.

Project Ella 

Year Awarded  2023

Total award amount   $495,990

Location   Leiden, The Netherlands

Program   Egg-Tech Prize

Matching Funders   Open Philanthropy

Grantee Institution   In Ovo

Commercially, chicks can only be sexed after they hatch, requiring producers to devote time and resources to incubating male chicks, only to cull them. This research is further developing and scaling in-ovo sexing technology that measures a naturally occurring biomarker within the embryos’ waste fluid. This fluid differs between the sexes, allowing sorting the eggs by sex on the ninth day of development with high accuracy.

Developing Smart Breeding Methods to Increase Crop Resilience 

ID: 22-000522