Environmental factors can influence disease and injury rates as well as stress and anxiety levels. There is a wide variation of improvements possible in the environmental conditions for farmed animals, and many well-established charities tackling these. Among others, we explored interventions like improving light management or decreasing  stocking density at broiler chicken and turkey farms. A relatively neglected area, however, is managing dissolved oxygen (DO) levels for farmed fish. Dissolved oxygen is the most important indicator of water quality and is critical for fish welfare. Evan small variations in DO levels can be associated with increasing cortisol levels in the blood.

Preliminary research suggests that proper DO management can make impressively cost-effective improvements to animal lives. We estimated that this intervention can gain fish 21.5 welfare points, which is considerably more than what could be achieved by a charity aimed at increasing the space given to broiler chickens.

We expect this to be in our top 5 most promising ask reports we will create in this research. This report considers why this is, and what bottlenecks this initiative may face.