On Your Farm

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On Your Farm: Food & Farming Awards finalist: The Good Life Project

Food & Farming Awards finalist: The Good Life Project

BBC Radio 4 - On Your Farm, Food & Farming Awards finalist: The Good Life Project

Charlotte Smith visits the last of three finalists in the BBC Food and Farming Awards.

Charlotte Smith is judging the "Farming for the Future" category in this year's BBC Food and Farming Awards. In this programme she visits the last of her three finalists.

Andrew Booth has been recording health metrics for his dairy cows for 25 years. This year, he also started measuring their emotional wellbeing. That's because his farm is part of The Good Life Project.

Livestock farms that supply Waitrose already have to meet specific standards on issues like antibiotic use and diet. Now the supermarket is introducing a system to measure the emotional wellbeing of the livestock on the farms which it buys from. An app has been designed so that auditors can measure aspects of animal behaviour, with the data being used to provide an overall score. So far the app has been introduced for ducks, chickens, dairy cows, pigs and veal calves. In the coming years it will be extended across beef cattle, lamb and even farmed salmon.

The Good Life Project has been chosen by Charlotte Smith as one of her three finalists in the "Farming for the Future" category of this year's BBC Food and Farming Awards. In this programme, Charlotte visits Andrew's farm to get an idea of how the project works on the ground, and meets one of the academics behind it.

Presented by Charlotte Smith
Produced by Heather Simons

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Food & Farming Awards finalist: The Good Life Project

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