Validating systems

Documentation that the system achieves its targets for sustainability consistently is vital as:

1. Farmers who wish to adopt these systems must have confidence that the system works in practice and is proven to be commercially viable.
2. The wider public must have confidence that the system really does provide improvements for the animals.

This will be achieved for animal welfare in line with the results from the Welfare Quality Project (WQP), a large European Union funded project studying the way in which animal welfare can be measured.

The work has raised the profile and validity of the use of animal based outcome measures of animal welfare. This represents a shift away from sole reliance on input measures i.e. prescribing exactly how animals should be kept (e.g. exact stocking densities, feeder and drinker space), towards also looking at the effects of a system, or the ‘outcomes’, on the animals themselves (e.g. injuries, feather cover, behaviour).