17 Dec 2025
Farm vets told of “fork in the road” and need to ensure they shape technology’s future usage.
Chris Simpson
Job Title
Image: © Kaikoro / Adobe Stock
Farm vets have been warned they are at a “fork in the road” in shaping artificial intelligence (AI) usage in the agriculture sector.
The topic was discussed in the London Vet Show session, “AI on farms – is it good for vets and animal welfare?”
Jonathan Birch, professor of philosophy at London School of Economics and principal investigator at the Foundations of Animal Sentience project, told delegates: “Big decisions we can make now will determine how this sector goes.
“One fork in the road leads to terrible consequences, and the other ways to go can lead to very good consequences.”
Using an example of automated battery chicken farms in China, Prof Birch said: “One of the concerns we might have here is that, is this technology enabling kinds of farming that we should not, in fact, want to happen at all?”
Robert Hyde, Vet Vision AI co-founder and University of Nottingham vet school associate professor in computational biology, suggested vets can be a “gatekeeper” for such intensive systems.
Prof Birch responded: “Vets have an absolutely crucial role in that. We can see this technology go in a way that is making the most intensive kinds of farming even more profitable, or we can see it going in a way that is genuinely prioritising welfare and creating welfare improvements. We need it to go that second way.”
He said AI presented a big opportunity for a “welfare auditing revolution”, with regulators, Defra and other stakeholders having access to vast amounts of data on what is happening on farms.
But Prof Birch also cautioned against “gamifying welfare”.
He said: “There’s a concern that the technology goes in the wrong direction. It might move us away from that model of human-animal bonding and relationships and genuine care to one of, ‘Well, I’ve optimised this, and I’ve optimised this, this and this, look how good the welfare is.’”
Prof Birch also warned of the risk of “welfare washing”, adding: “There’s no independent auditing. It creates scope, if we get this wrong, for companies to be able to claim they have this incredible welfare innovation where no one has really been able to validate that claim.”
Prof Hyde suggested having AI technology in the vet sector be tightly regulated would be best, but is “quite unrealistic” due to lack of funding, adding: “It’s up to the vet to understand what the pros and cons are; if they’re not confident in it, they shouldn’t rely on it.”
To that end, he called for education on AI to be woven into veterinary curricula and CPD opportunities.
Paul Horwood, IVC Evidensia’s UK country head of farm, likened AI usage in the agriculture sector to the “wild wild west”.
He noted that in contrast to the small animal sector, where vets are the end user that AI companies will develop for, in agriculture the end user is the farmer and vets risk being bypassed.
Dr Horwood said: “The farm vet is not automatically involved in that conversation. The farm vet, if they want to get involved, they have to step up, push forwards, explain their worth, explain why they should be involved in that conversation.”
