**Carbon Cluck-Char** is a circular farming project aimed at transforming poultry litter--an environmental and disposal challenge--into a valuable biochar product with multiple benefits. By processing poultry bedding through high-temperature pyrolysis, Carbon Cluck-Char will create a biochar that can be applied in both biogas production and as a sustainable fertiliser for arable fields, effectively creating a closed-loop system.
Working with partners across agriculture, technology, and biogas sectors, the project will also develop automated litter monitoring tools to help farmers best allocate biochar.
The collaboration will demonstrate how poultry farms can turn waste into profit, reducing costs associated with disposal and compliance while generating new revenue through sustainable fertiliser and energy sources.
This project ultimately supports the UK's agricultural resilience and commitment to circular economy practices.
To compete with low-cost, low-welfare imports, UK production systems must continually enhance productivity, sustainability & resilience while addressing the current welfare issues. This project delivers a novel rapid intervention system that leverages an in-demand AI poultry monitoring software, and insect's remarkable capacity to encourage natural behaviour and improve welfare as a high-quality source of protein with antimicrobial peptides.
Understanding of the risk and direction of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) spread through food-borne routes, and development of interventions to limit the spread of AMR within and between humans, animals, environment and food is a significant challenge, requiring a 360-degree investigation of a complex, interconnected system of humans, animals, environment on one hand and geographical, societal and climate-related variables on the other. **This project will develop a monitoring system using AI and advanced tech to detect AMR spread in the interconnected human-animal-environment-food system ('One Health').**
Today, the poultry supply-chain is segmented, and the vast majority of data collected around the production process is heavily siloed. Input providers on one end and processing plants on the other rely on automation and analytics, but the data is kept within each company. At the same time, growing sheds are largely data-dark, with limited data being collected or processed. As a result, the industry is plagued with high variability in welfare, production and mortality; alongside inconsistent utilisation at factories. This project aims to address these pain points for a sector facing significant threats, including low-cost/welfare poultry exports from the US and Latin America.
Our vision is to revolutionise the entire poultry production process by deploying our unified data platform with some of the world's largest integrators. The end goals are large-scale improvements in efficiency, animal welfare, and cost control.
This project will develop a smart lighting system that dynamically responds to chicken behaviour to improve welfare and productivity. The right lighting sequence in chicken barns is well known to improve FCR and overall productivity. However, farmers are still largely monitoring for problems through manual surveillance, which increases the risk of disease and lighting control gives only day/night cycles and blanket control of the whole barn. Our work will develop an automated system for chicken health management that helps farmers increase productivity while reducing biosecurity risks.
StockBot is the integration of Kell Idea's award-winning 'LeoRover' and FLOX's AI-powered performance and welfare monitoring system, NetFLOX; successfully deployed under a prior Innovate UK project.
StockBot will become a commercial agribot system to monitor and manage litter quality while taking high-value actions such as the spraying of neutralising agents, which has a significant impact on **reducing ammonia emissions and achieving DEFRA/UKRI's goal of 'net zero'.**
StockBot's on-board sensors capture ammonia levels in areas identified as having poor litter quality -- creating virtuous feedback loops and enabling business-critical environmental data to be shared with supply chain stakeholders.
The consortium represents a nexus between R&D, growers and ag-entrepreneurs, with **clear productivity and resilience benefits for broiler farmers**. To ensure adoption, end-users will collaborate with the **research and innovation community from initial design studies through to Knowledge Exchange**.
This 18-month project builds NetFLOX-XXL, an AI-powered remote broiler farm management system; with innovations for mass adoption. Our product uses advanced AI to improve **productivity, sustainability and resilience** in the broiler industry, and has demonstrated PoC in previous demonstrations.
Now, we're conducting innovative R&D to build a scalable industrial demonstrator system (NetFLOX-XXL); helping the industry to improve welfare outcomes and move closer to net-zero. This work builds the base of a commercial system to scale to 1,000 sheds. The UK broiler supply chain is under strain -- endemic labour shortages, Brexit, Covid-19, incoming environmental regulations, and CO2 and fuel shortages; are threatening national food security, safety, and self-sufficiency. The opportunity to do so is time-sensitive, and now. In this project, the consortium will prime a ruggedised NetFLOX-XXL for **widespread adoption**.
The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly exacerbated an endemic labour shortage in the UK broiler industry while underscoring the very real biosecurity risk of human/livestock interaction. In leaving Europe, the UK is opening itself up to cheaper, low-welfare chicken from the USA. This has put a lot of pressure on UK broiler farmers who either need to race to the 'welfare bottom', or find a solution to compete while maintaining and improving their welfare standards. Increased demand for poultry has also meant farmers are building nearer residential locations and vulnerable SSSI ecosystems. This is particularly the case in the two largest poultry producing regions -- Hereford and Shropshire.
The recent advances in, and falling costs of sensor systems, automation, data science and image processing algorithms enables a radical rethink of conventional farming. This project aims to make high-welfare chicken production more cost effective and help the UK chicken industry continue to grow -- sustainably.
This project will develop NetFLOX -- an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system providing poultry farmers with 24/7 media feeds, decision-support data and real-time alerts to improve welfare and performance and reduce environmental impact.
NetFLOX is a remote farm management system with initial applications in the high-welfare UK broiler industry. The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly exacerbated an endemic labour shortage while underscoring the biosecurity risks of human/livestock interaction. Increased demand for chicken (which spiked further during lockdown) has necessitated farmers building nearer residential locations and vulnerable SSSI ecosystems such as peat-bogs -- particularly in key poultry-producing regions Devon and Shropshire.
In addition, with Brexit looming, the UK is opening itself up to cheaper, potentially chlorinated, low-welfare chicken from the USA. This is putting significant pressure on UK broiler farmers to 'race to the welfare bottom', or find a solution to compete -- all in the context of a post-pandemic world. To help the industry scale sustainably, and remain resilient to "unprecedented times", automation and evidence-led management are a must... and the time is now.
**NetFLOX represents the future of farming: remote, low-impact, high-welfare, and with greatly reduced risk of zoonosis.**