By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Researchers at the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station (MAES) have received new funding to continue their research on the use of wireless sensor technology on chickens.
The researchers received the grant of $375,000 from the USDA to study how well the technology can monitor the habits and welfare of egg laying hens under different living conditions.

“With a lot of the push to move away from cage housing systems, there’s more of a concern about keeping track of the birds as individuals,” said Janice Siegford, an animal science researcher at Michigan State University and the MAES. “We were ahead of the curve on animal welfare issues.”

Siegford said they have been working with the sensor technology for a few years, but the new grant money will help them intensify their efforts. She said the research involves a lot of time monitoring the hens’ movements in their environment. The money will enable them to hire students to perform some of those monitoring tasks.
Other researchers involved in the project include Janice Swanson, a professor of animal science at MSU, Darrin Karcher, an MSU animal science specialist, Ruth Newberry and Marvin Pitts from Washington State University and Joy Mench of the University of California-Davis.
The sensor technology may help scientists deal with animal welfare issues for chickens that live in non-cage housing systems. There are many different kinds of housing situations for chickens and it’s not clear which ones are the best for them and the most cost effective for chicken farmers, Siegford said. She stated that in non-cage systems, there are still animal welfare issues, except they tend to be different: the major ones are disease transmission, pecking and cannibalism. In free range systems, chicken predation is also a concern.

“It may be a tool that farmers could use to show that they care about what’s going on with their birds,” Siegford said. “It could also help farmers catch a problem, like feather-pecking, before it gets out of hand.”

The sensor technology being used was originally designed for use on humans. Siegford described it as a lightweight, small sensor weighing only 10 grams, or less than an ounce. She said that battery life is “definitely an issue.”

Right now the researchers are focusing on making the communications software more user friendly. Right now, the software communicates what a chicken is doing, and whether or not it might be stressed, by creating a jagged line on a nearby computer monitor. The shape of the line communicates something very specific, Siegford said. What they want to do is make it so the program communicates by making a pictograph instead, or even a sentence describing the situation.

Eventually, they would like to test the technology in a more commercial setting. They don’t know yet if it could be practical to use the sensors on a multitude of birds in one housing arrangement, or how many birds they would need to use it on in order for the technology to accurately gauge what’s happening in the hen house.