The final year of the four-year aWISH project is now underway. The name aWISH stands for “Animal Welfare Indicators at the Slaughterhouse”. A large portion of the data has already been collected.
The project focuses on standardised and automated measurements in the slaughterhouse, during loading and unloading, transport and slaughter, which can provide insight into the welfare of pigs on the farm. Vion Food Group is one of the pilot companies participating in the European project.
Various sensors have been developed and/or installed at Vion Groenlo to enable measurements to be taken, so that data can be collected continuously and automatically.
Twelve suppliers of the Dutch “Beter Leven” quality mark are participating in the project. The measurements taken at the pig farms are observations by welfare researchers and data from climate sensors in the barn. By linking all the measurements taken on the farm and in the slaughterhouse, animal welfare on the farm can be determined.
The ultimate goal of the aWISH project is to identify which measurements provide good information about animal welfare. From there, suppliers can see “how they are doing” and advice is given on best practices. Based on this, any improvement plans can be drawn up in the context of continuous improvement. Vion can also provide tips on this. This means from supplier to transporter and slaughterhouse.
The project is led by EV ILVO (Flemish Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Belgium) and has 28 partners from 11 European countries. aWISH is funded by Horizon Europe and will run from 1 November 2022 for a total duration of four years.
