Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Mariann Molnár

Location: Hungary
Academic field: Animal welfare
Award category: PhD Holder

Guidance Memo

• Title: Enhancing farm animal welfare through housing technology certification and alternative farming systems
• How to cite: Molnár, Mariann. Enhancing farm animal welfare through housing technology certification and alternative farming systems. Tiny Beam Fund, 31 July 2024, https://doi.org/10.15868/socialsector.44064.
• What We Learned From It:
  • Transition economies in Europe – whether EU Members, candidate countries or non-members – are increasingly facing pressures to intensify animal agricultural production. Countries of Central Eastern Europe are already transitioning to intensive systems. Countries in the Balkan region have managed to retain most of their small-scale farming, yet many are contemplating the need to invest in large-scale animal farming operations.
  • Contrary to the common belief that farmers are solely responsible for the treatment of farmed animals, farmers are only partially accountable for on-farm standards. Multiple players in the value chain, including industries that supply feed, farm animals, and housing tools and equipment have direct influence on the conditions animals are subjected to on farms.
  • One solution that has shown promise to help these farmers improve on-farm animal welfare is the use of housing technology certification systems, such as that used in Switzerland. It is a flexible, data-driven approach to assess housing technologies before they are sold to farmers. This system, carried out by authorities in collaboration with technology suppliers and farmers, enables tool and technology innovation, offers transparency, and provides additional checks and balances to ensure that housing technologies prioritize animal welfare.
  • Another solution is to transition to alternative farming practices that have short value chains, do not need large investments in fixed technologies, and allow farmers to access growing niche markets. Alternative farming systems offer great potential for developing sustainable agriculture and improving farm animal welfare standards beyond the established industrial model.

Links

• Read the Guidance Memo
• Read the Annotated Bibliography

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application

• It is important to understand animal farming in Central Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
  • First, even though small-scale non-industrial animal farming methods still dominate middle-income European countries, with the rise in income, these countries may transition away from the present small- to medium-scale farming practices and invest in large-scale intensive methods in the not-too-distant-future.
  • Second, some of these countries may soon be classified as high-income. For example, Romania became high-income in 2023.
  • Third, they are applying for EU membership, and may soon face the same situation experienced by high-income Central-Eastern European countries already in the EU and transitioned to industrial systems.
• The topic of animal housing suppliers is very important but highly neglected. Large-scale, industrial production systems have key actors along supply chains. But hardly any attention is paid to these actors such as animal housing suppliers. That is unfortunate because these actors play important roles and wield significant influence on farmers who are in direct contact with the animals every day, shaping the way the farmers treat their animals and the methods used to raise the animals.
  • In trying to implement animal welfare reforms, it is necessary to understand the pressures induced by actors up- and downstream from the farmers.
  • By drawing attention to this issue (which is rarely raised by NGOs, governments, funders of agriculture development, academics, and even the farmers themselves), there will be an opportunity to communicate with farmers (e.g., through national and international farmers organizations) and encourage them to acknowledge that they are experiencing power imbalances and other external sources of pressure that make it very difficult for them to improve conditions and practices, and resist using intensive methods.