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Professor Andrew Balmford is part of a team of Cambridge University scientists that have come up with a system of animal welfare that can be considered alongside other impacts of farming to help identify which farming systems are best.

Coming up with an overall measurement of animal welfare has previously been difficult because of disagreement on which factors are most important. For example, is a health problem more important than a behaviour problem? What level of welfare is good enough?

The new system assesses the quality of an animal’s life through a wide-ranging set of welfare measurements, reflecting a range of concerns about welfare. The results can be integrated into a single score to enable comparison across farms.

This will enable exploration of trade-offs between animal welfare and other issues of concern to consumers, such as the impact of farming on the environment.

Various scoring methods were tested - giving more or less weight to the different aspects of animal welfare - on 74 pig farming systems in the UK. The team were surprised to find that each method gave broadly the same overall result in terms of which farms, and types of farms, performed best and worst.

Of the study Professor Balmford said “Despite ongoing debate about how to measure animal welfare, we found we can identify which types of farms we might want to encourage and which we shouldn’t with reasonable consistency.”

It is hoped that this work will open up possibilities for greater rolling out of welfare assessment scores in food labelling, including in other species as well as pigs