Harbro Limited

"There is currently extensive inefficiency in the UK beef sector. Producers routinely assess the performance of their animals by eye and frequently retain them on farm too long, resulting in animals becoming too fat. This leads to increased variable farm costs, reduced annual capacity of beef finishing units and sub-optimal price paid for carcasses -- for...

Tail biting in growing pigs is affected by many risk factors, but an outbreak can start without warning or obvious cause. This unpredictable tail biting results in pain and sickness for bitten pigs and severe economic losses for farmers: infection through tail wounds results in abattoir condemnation of meat. Tail docking of piglets is partly effective at ...

The goals of the project are: (i) to develop animal-mounted sensor systems that capture beef cattle feeding behaviour patterns and integrate this information with a feeding systems that accurately estimates feed intake at the individual animal level and (ii) to develop techniques for monitoring, in a commercial environment, the performance efficiency of i...

Subclinical & clinical disease is the main factor responsible for pig system inefficiency & reduction in pro-ductivity and welfare. Currently disease detection is done through human observation or diagnostic sur-veillance, but monitoring continuously involves significant costs & effort.The project aims to develop & validate technology to automatically mon...

This project aims to develop a non-intrusive system which will allow beef finishing units to identify the optimal time to market finished cattle. The system will combine innovative; animal handling; automated weighing; image capture; and analysis software to provide realtime objective feedback on animal condition, market value and optimal time to take to ...

UK production of salmon, pigs and poultry is over-reliant on imported soy protein which has significant sustainability and supply concerns. Using air classification (AC) of UK grown faba beans we will develop two new products to partially replace imported soy. AC is a simple, low cost process requiring no addition of water, solvents or heating and will be...

The consortium will develop a health and condition monitoring platform, a foundation to creating decision support applications in order to catalyse improvements in production efficiency and a concomitant reduction in waste and losses in the ruminant protein supply chain. The solution will encompass reliable and continuous monitoring and sensing of specifi...