Standardized key welfare indicators are the foundation for meaningful improvement in poultry production.
The shift toward measurable, outcome-based metrics for broiler welfare — and the technology to track them — is transforming how producers manage flock health and respond to customer demands, Karen Christensen, senior director for Animal Welfare at Tyson Foods, shared during the 2026 Georgia Precision Poultry Farming Conference.
Central to putting outcome-based metrics into practice are key welfare indicators, or KWIs. These are standardized metrics developed by the International Poultry Welfare Alliance for broilers, layers and turkeys. Christensen considers adoption of these indicators across the industry a critical priority.
Footpad scoring is the most established KWI example in broiler welfare. The condition of a bird's feet at processing reflects the cumulative quality of litter management, ventilation and drinker management throughout the flock's life.
"The goal should be 100% good paws," Christensen said. "Paw lesions indicate there were some things in the house that weren't perfect."
From lagging indicators to predictive tools
Footpad scoring is, by nature, a lagging indicator — it tells producers what happened after the fact. The next frontier is predictive welfare monitoring that identifies problems early enough to intervene.
Two technologies developed as part of the SMART Broiler project, funded in part by the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, point toward what that future looks like.
Optiflock, developed by animal behaviorist Dr. Marian Dawkins, uses cameras to analyze flock movement. From that data, the system can predict footpad dermatitis risk, feed conversion outcomes, lameness prevalence and even the likelihood of Campylobacter contamination at the plant as early as the first week of a flock's life.
A complementary system developed by AudioT takes an acoustic approach, analyzing flock vocalizations to detect stress, feed outages, temperature discomfort and early signs of respiratory disease.
Together, the two systems feed into dashboard interfaces that present welfare status in a simple red-yellow-green format, flagging problems before they escalate.
Beyond these targeted tools, Christensen sees significant opportunity in aggregating and analyzing the environmental data broiler farms already generate — temperature, humidity, airspeed, ammonia and CO2 levels — to build farm-specific performance models that connect house conditions to production and welfare outcomes.
One notable gap she flagged: reliable continuous litter moisture monitoring. No commercially viable solution has yet emerged, but Christensen believes one would have an outsized impact on footpad health and overall flock welfare.
"If we could get ahead of excess litter moisture before it becomes a serious problem, that would be a really big improvement," she said.
The broader case for metrics
Adoption of KWIs does more than improve flock outcomes. It gives producers documented evidence of welfare performance they can share with integrators, retail customers, foodservice partners and ultimately with consumers who increasingly want to know how their food was raised.
The tools will keep improving. But the foundation, Christensen argues, is the metrics themselves — and the industry commitment to measure, report and act on them consistently.
"We have to monitor what we're going to manage," she said. "Technology will help us do that faster and better. But it starts with knowing what to measure."
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