Highlights Report 2025

1. Freedom To Express Normal Behavior

Perdue is funding a PhD student at Virginia Tech University in partnership with Dr. Leonie Jacobs, an animal welfare expert, to study and document use of elevated enrichments in commercial poultry houses. The work began in September 2024 and will be completed in August 2027. The objective and hypothesis of this work is to determine the potential benefit of added platform space for bird welfare, productivity, and environmental parameters.

As part of our research of enrichments as additional square footage in existing poultry houses, we retrofitted two houses on commercial farms with benches and platforms. One farm grows medium sized broilers that generally harvest at approximately seven pounds. The second farm grows larger sized broilers that generally weigh approximately nine pounds at harvest. The ramps and platforms can be designed to add roughly 10% more “floor” space. If utilized appropriately, this innovation would provide enrichment as well as space. Space without needing to build additional chicken houses would be a great benefit: better welfare without a negative carbon footprint.

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2. Freedom From Pain, Injury and Disease

We committed to write and implement a standardize litter scoring method for all poultry growing locations and determine if a study is needed to optimize their use. The assessment is based on 10 observations broken down into two groups of five. The first group of five describes what the litter physically looks like, while the second group of five describes what interventions have been implemented. Each observation is scored one 1 to 10, with a possible score up to 100.While our chick livability is better than the industry average, we have committed to identify the cause of flocks with normal chick starts and determine if process improvement opportunities exist to enhance bird starts.

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3. Freedom From Hunger & Thirst and Discomfort

We have expanded our on-farm hatch project to commercial chicken houses to determine the value for all seasons. In 2024, we committed to replace a minimum of one flock of a week each season in different bird size programs and report on the benefits and challenges.

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4. Freedom From Fear and Distress

In 2024, we committed to identify and document best practices for machine bird catching that allows an auditor to check compliance. We developed two best-practice document is focused on the proper selection of personnel running the auto catching machine head (including a temperament that is calm and caring), general safety, operational machine specifics, daily checks, nine different welfare specific practices, and those things that are done at the end of the shift.

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