Price, convenience and taste have pushed poultry meat and eggs past other animal proteins into the top spot in the diets of consumers around the globe. As consumers have become more affluent and activist groups more vocal, poultry producers are being challenged to demonstrate that the birds they care for are raised with good welfare. In addition, climate change concerns have triggered greenhouse gas reduction goals throughout poultry supply chains.
These heightened bird welfare and overall sustainability concerns are challenging for poultry producers. Fortunately, innovators and entrepreneurs are harnessing artificial intelligence, machine learning and electronic sensing devices to create solutions and aides to deal with these challenges. The Poultry Tech Summit was launched in 2018 by WATT Global Media with USPOULTRY, Georgia Tech Research Institute and the University of Georgia’s Poultry Science department as collaborating partners. The Summit will return on November 3-6, 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., and has a new collaborating partner, the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Poultry & Eggs (US-RSPE). The US-RSPE Annual Meeting will be collocated with the Poultry Tech Summit next year.
Well over half of the improvements in bird performance, rate of growth, feed conversion and rate of lay that the poultry industry and consumers have benefitted from are the result of decades of selective breeding. But new technologies for everything such as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, incubation, disinfection, feed formulation, environmental control, automated feeding and watering have also contributed to the exceptional advances in efficiency, bird welfare and sustainability that the poultry industry has experienced.
It is a natural fit to bring members of the poultry supply chain, who are responsible for evaluating and improving the sustainability of poultry products, together with the innovators and entrepreneurs who are working to apply new technologies to the challenges the supply chain faces today and will face in the future. I recently attended the 2024 Poultry Welfare & Sustainability Summit jointly hosted by the US-RSPE and the International Poultry Welfare Alliance (IPWA) in Atlanta September 3-5, 2-024. The adage, “what gets measured gets fixed,” has always rung true for me. Continuous improvement in bird welfare and supply chain sustainability requires reliable and affordable means of measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) and technologies which reduce resource use, recycle/upcycle waste/biproducts, and improve bird health and well-being.
The Poultry Welfare & Sustainability Summit started off with a field trip to the University of Georgia’s Poultry Science department. Paco Fernandez, DVM, working for Zinpro demonstrated a method for evaluating broiler carcasses internally and externally in the processing plant and using this data to drive continuous improvement in bird welfare. I invite you to listen to my podcast conversation with Dr. Fernadez and learn more about this approach.
The challenges at hand for the poultry supply chain are great, but we are in a time of rapid technological advancement; and this creates great opportunity. Please make plans to join us next November in Atlanta for the 2025 Poultry Tech Summit and the US-RSPE Annual Meeting and become part of the conversations and solutions.
