Meeting summary: Tech x FAW group discussion 2: Reducing keel bone damage in laying hens

[rhjiang]

Thanks to everyone who joined our discussion! There were a few potential actionable avenues, such as: hosting a competition for a farms to minimize KBF rates, investigating whether it can be claimed that KBF has un-favorable health implications for consumers, and conducting large-scale experiments to try to optimize housing design parameters.

Our next discussion will be 03/01/2026 10:00 PST /13:00 EST / 18:00 UTC. If you'd like to lead the discussion, please volunteer by 02/05! You can start a post about it, or run your idea by the group chat, or just reach out to me. Here are topics people have thrown out there.

Here are some notes from today. Please correct me, add to the list, or share lingering thoughts in the comments.

• Aviary design
  • Ramps and soft coverings, as well as aviary complexity for pullet rearing, have all been shown to meaningfully reduce KBF
  • However, actually optimizing variables seems under-explored.
    • e.g., are there better soft covering materials than those that were studied? Better ramp layouts? Better arrangements of perches/tiers for natural movement and reduced collision? There need to be large-scale experiments to really know the best way to do this.
• Considerations for large-scale experiments for optimizing for KBF reduction
  • Need capability to assess outcomes
    • Coefficient Giving gave a grant for an x-ray technology for gauging bone quality
  • University of Oxford has a collaboration with Tyson Foods that allows large-scale testing of proposed changes to housing systems in U.S. farms
    • Seemingly open to collaboration and information sharing with people who reach out
  • Global Food Partners' cage-free innovation and welfare hubs has farms in China and Indonesia designed to demonstrate best practices in cage-free farming. Might be a possible place to run experiments. Have relationships with EA community.
• Breeding
  • Breeders do care about things like bone health, even if they're not currently impacting productivity, because if they let it deteriorate over many generations, then find out later that the final breed becomes unproductive for this reason, they can't go roll it back
  • Breeders produce detailed documents on how to rear the birds (e.g. light and temperature parameters on each day of their lives). Implies they have a way to study/optimize the impacts of these parameters.
• Adoption of KBF mitigation measures
  • Any egg nutritional/food safety relationship with KBF?
    • If this could be demonstrated, even if minor, publicizing it to consumers could have a major impact -- could provide a source of economic incentive to reduce KBF
  • Philanthropic incentives
    • Can someone just pay farmers to use ramps and soft coverings?
    • Can someone host a competition among farms for achieving the lowest KBF rates?
      • Precedent: Perdue farms had family farmers compete to innovate welfare enrichments
      • e.g., offer a cash prize for whatever farm scores the best at some inspection of keel bone health at the end of some fixed time period
        • Could also collect data on all farms' housing designs and outcomes
  • Productivity-related incentives
    • Study results are mixed, regarding relationship between KBF and productivity. Potentially not compelling enough
  • Are egg shells thinner/more prone to breakage from more calcium-deficient hens?
    • Related anecdote: in broilers, some slaughterhouses look at the condition of chickens' feet and pay proportionally condition because this metric is related to rates of meat being rejected downstream
  • Certification-related incentives, as suggested by Charity Entrepreneurship's research report
  • Neither breeders nor farmers hold much power to change things because they have small profit margins. Grocery stores hold the power
• Nutrition
  • While there are many reasons to believe that factors like calcium, vitamin D, and others are highly relevant, there don't seem to be any slam dunk takeaways from research
  • Potentially industry would be able to optimize feed better than ad-hoc research studies if incentivized to reduce KBF