Animal Nutrition & Health
Reducing the environmental footprint of livestock production has become a major priority across the global food industry. Poultry is often considered one of the more climate-efficient animal proteins, yet the sector is still under pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions further while maintaining productivity and high animal welfare standards.
A new collaborative initiative called Low Climate Impact Chicken, or LowClic, is tackling this challenge by rethinking how broiler chickens are fed and managed. Rather than changing the birds themselves through breeding or genetics, the project focuses on optimizing the systems around them—particularly feed strategies, barn management, and data-driven health monitoring.
The goal is straightforward but ambitious: produce chicken meat with a significantly smaller climate footprint without sacrificing performance, animal health, or welfare.
In poultry production, feed is the dominant contributor to climate impact. The production and transport of feed ingredients—along with the handling of manure and bedding—generate the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions associated with broiler farming.
Estimates suggest that around 95 percent of the total emissions linked to broiler production come from these areas.
This makes nutrition the most powerful lever for change.
Within the LowClic project, researchers and industry partners are exploring new feed strategies designed to reduce emissions at their source. One important area is the selection of raw materials with a lower environmental footprint. This includes evaluating ingredients that require less energy to produce or transport.
Another focus is reducing the sector’s dependence on imported soy as a protein source. Soy cultivation has long been associated with land-use change and deforestation in some regions, which adds to its climate impact. By introducing alternative protein ingredients and improving feed formulation, the project hopes to lower reliance on soy while maintaining nutritional quality.
But ingredient choice is only part of the equation. Feed efficiency—the ability of chickens to convert feed into body weight—also plays a major role. The more efficiently birds use nutrients, the less feed is required overall, and the lower the emissions per kilogram of meat produced.
Optimizing feeding programs therefore has the potential to reduce both environmental impact and production costs at the same time.
While sustainability measures are important, they must not compromise the health or welfare of the animals. Any change in feed composition or management practices can potentially affect the birds’ metabolism, immune function, or growth performance.
To ensure that sustainability improvements do not create unintended consequences, the project integrates a sophisticated monitoring system known as Verax, developed by DSM Nutritional Products.
Unlike traditional performance monitoring—which often relies on visible signs such as weight gain or feed intake—this system examines the birds’ biological responses at a much earlier stage.
It does this through a combination of blood biomarkers, data from post-mortem examinations, feeding programs, and environmental information from the barns. By analyzing these inputs together, the system can reveal how chickens are responding internally to their diet and living conditions.
In many cases, nutritional imbalances or health problems begin developing long before they become visible to farmers. Growth rates may still look normal even when birds are already experiencing metabolic stress or immune challenges.
The Verax system aims to detect these hidden signals early.
Early detection is particularly valuable in large-scale poultry production, where thousands of birds are raised together. A small imbalance in feed formulation or a ventilation problem in the barn can quickly affect an entire flock.
With the help of biological markers in the birds’ blood, the system can identify issues such as poor nutrient absorption, metabolic stress, weakened immunity, or environmental problems like inadequate ventilation that may lead to heat stress.
By spotting these risks days before visible symptoms appear, farmers and nutritionists can intervene sooner—adjusting feed formulations, improving barn conditions, or implementing targeted health measures.
This approach shifts poultry management from reactive to proactive.
Instead of responding to disease or performance declines after they occur, producers can prevent many problems before they escalate.
One of the most valuable aspects of combining the LowClic project with an early-warning system is the ability to evaluate sustainability measures in real time.
Climate-friendly feeding strategies may look promising on paper, but their true value depends on how birds respond in practice.
For example, a new feed ingredient may reduce emissions during production, but if it reduces feed efficiency or stresses the birds metabolically, the overall benefits could disappear. Conversely, a carefully balanced feeding strategy could both reduce emissions and improve bird performance.
By combining feeding data, barn conditions, and biological markers, researchers can see exactly how the birds react to changes.
This allows the project to identify solutions that genuinely work in commercial production—solutions that reduce environmental impact while supporting healthy, productive flocks.
The broader vision behind the project reflects a growing trend in livestock farming: the use of data to improve decision-making.
Modern poultry farms already collect large amounts of information, from feed intake and growth rates to temperature and humidity in barns. When this data is combined with biological insights, it becomes a powerful tool for optimizing production systems.
In this case, the integration of nutrition science, veterinary diagnostics, and digital data analysis creates a more complete picture of flock health and performance.
Such systems could play an increasingly important role as the poultry sector faces stricter sustainability targets and growing demand for transparency in food production.
Farmers will need tools that help them balance productivity, animal welfare, and environmental responsibility—and do so efficiently in large-scale operations.
Projects like LowClic highlight the importance of collaboration across the agricultural value chain. The initiative brings together feed companies, researchers, technology providers, and agricultural organizations to address a complex challenge that no single player could solve alone.
By combining expertise in nutrition, animal health, data analytics, and farm management, the partners aim to develop practical solutions that can be applied widely across the poultry industry.
If successful, the approach could serve as a model for other livestock sectors seeking to reduce their environmental footprint without sacrificing productivity.
The next phase of the project will focus on refining feeding strategies and validating them under real farm conditions while continuing to monitor bird health through biological data. By combining climate-focused nutrition with early detection tools, the initiative hopes to create a blueprint for poultry production that is both environmentally responsible and highly efficient. If the approach proves successful, data-driven health monitoring and climate-optimized feeding could become standard practice in the next generation of sustainable poultry farming.
16 February 2026
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