The University of Saskatchewan will be home to a unique poultry research facility that will at the same time give the public a chance to see animal-welfare friendly housing systems.
Construction on the $15.6 million state-of-the-art poultry laying facility is slated to begin next summer and should be complete in two or three years.
A good chunk of the funding is in place, more than $6.2 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation Fund, $3 million from Saskatchewan egg producers and another $1-million by the University of Saskatchewan College of Agriculture and Bioresources.
Dr. Karen Schwean-Lardner, a researcher and a professor in the Department of Animal and Poultry Science, is excited about the facility and what it can do for poultry research.
"This will move us so far forward in poultry research,” she said in a news release. “This is causing me to push back my retirement because I want the first experiment in a system like this. This is so exciting.”
As part of new guidelines by the Egg Farmers of Canada, "conventional" housing systems for chickens will be phased out on Canadian farms by 2036. Dr. Schwean-Lardner said conventional cages have positives and negatives for the chickens.
"You could see a sick bird and be able to do something with that bird. You could see how the birds were doing. You can see all of that. The poop falls through and it goes out every day so the environment stays very nice." she said of the positives of conventional cages. "But you also saw that it's a small space with no perches. Birds go up when they are afraid or when they're stressed. They like to go to perches. There's none in there. They don't have a place to forage. So all three of the housing systems that are coming into Canada will have all of those."
The new facility will be nearly 24,000 square feet and have examples of three systems: enriched housing, free run, and free range, which will allow birds to wander outside.
USask states the enriched housing is designed " to promote living conditions and reduce aggression levels for chickens. Ten individual housing rooms will be equipped with lighting, temperature, and other environmental variable controls to let the researchers conduct experiments safely and ethically, and the free-range systems will allow the birds to wander the Prairie outdoors."
Canadian egg farms operate under strict bio-security measures with no visitors, but the new facility at the University of Saskatchewan will allow the public – from students to those who want to learn more about where food comes from – to see how chickens are being housed.
"So it helps to connect Canadian consumers to agriculture, and that's so exciting." she said.
(With files from CJWW, Saskatoon)
