Revolutionizing Poultry Farming with Precision Management Techniques
Neeti Lakhani and Shwetambri Jamwal
COVS, Rampura Phul, GADVASU
Abstract
Precision management uses modern tools like IoT sensors, data analysis, and automation to improve every part of poultry farming from breeding and raising them to keeping them healthy and being environmentally friendly. It involves systems that collect data in real-time to watch important things closely. Also, it ensures that each bird gets the right care it needs to stay healthy and happy. This special attention not only makes birds more productive but also helps catch diseases early and take specific actions to stop them from spreading. Moreover, precision management helps use resources efficiently and reduces waste, making poultry farming more sustainable in the long run.
Keywords: Precision, data analysis, automation, environment
Introduction
A superior level of welfare indicates that the birds are healthy, have a favorable affective state, and exhibit normal behaviors. Behavioral problems, which appear as increased aggression, lameness, cannibalism, or feather pecking, are one of the most serious challenges in current chicken production and can have a considerable influence on welfare, resulting in economic losses. Furthermore, today’s poultry farms attempt to reduce the number of personnel while maintaining or growing the number of birds, resulting in lower flock welfare and the inability to demonstrate a certain species’ behaviour (Castro et al., 2023). As a result, monitoring bird behaviour, feeding, and environmental factors is critical for improving production performance and increasing bird welfare. Furthermore, rising public concern about poultry breeding and welfare has prompted the development of methods to improve control and monitoring efficiency. Precision Poultry Farming techniques allow for the unattended collection of widely understood data on housing conditions and birds in real time utilizing intelligent technology, resulting in trustworthy information due to the lack of direct human-bird interaction. Data from various sources, collected by sensors or other equipment, can be analyzed to assist construct an automated management system based on real-time information, allowing control over bird welfare, health, and performance. Precision Poultry Farming technologies can assist detect bird welfare issues early on, improve and accelerate management decisions, and ultimately reduce economic losses (Olejnik et al., 2022).
Methods to monitor the efficiency of poultry
Monitoring the weight
- Automatic weighing systems, such as pan scales, need less active labor.
- Pan scales are a platform suspended low above the trash that connects to an electronic calculating unit and measures the weight of the individual who steps on it.
iii. Using scales as a barrier between the bird and the drinker/feeder or enrichment can increase measurement accuracy.
- The birds do not experience stress from catching or interacting with humans.
v.The limited mobility of older birds, who do not step on scales, presents a challenge when weighing using an automatic system.
Monitoring movement
- Broiler feet are the third most valuable characteristic, following breasts and wings.
ii.Modern broiler hens’ high development rates result in reduced mobility, posing a welfare concern
iii.Birds with decreased activity levels are more likely to develop footpad dermatitis, commonly known as pododermatitis, footpad lesions, or hock burn
iv.Foot lesions can lead to pain, decreased locomotion, reduced food and water intake, and decreased weight growth
v.RFID tags have been effectively employed to monitor individual activity and position in other bird species. Wearing the tags had no impact on the birds activity or leg health, as they are lightweight
- Automatically measuring flock optical flow allows for continuous observation and quick response to gait scores, making it a more objective and efficient method than manual assessment by service employees.
vii.Optical flow and flock behavior monitoring based on thermal imaging cameras as an automated method of welfare assessment has potential for usage in commercial farm situations.
viii.Nest monitoring is an important tool because it allows you to closely track the laying process.
Detection of disease
- Sensors can detect illness levels in big groups of birds kept in comparable environments across multiple farms.
ii. A radio telemetry system, such as an implantable wireless sensor network, can effectively monitor deep body temperature.
iii. Commercially available autonomous robots, like Octopus Poultry Safe (Octopus Robots, Cholet, France), can clean and sanitize poultry houses while collecting environmental data. - Continuous, autonomous monitoring of birds provides up-to-date health information and allows for a speedier response, saving money on treatment and medications.
Managing the environment of birds
- At any stage of chicken meat production, the maximum density in a farm or poultry house should not exceed 33 kg/m².
ii. The stocking density is 9 birds per m² of usable space.
iii. Laying hens in cages must have a minimum of 750 cm² per individual and a cage height of 35 cm at all times.
iv. Abnormal environmental circumstances can lead to reduced feed intake, slower growth, increased stress, and higher mortality rates. - The Kai-Zen Feeding Robot (Metabolic Robots, Kfar Tavor, Israel) adjusts feed doses to meet the demands of the flock at their current stage of growth, leading to improved food conversion rates.
vi. Solar Feed Cast (Little Bird Systems, Fayetteville, NC, USA) monitors feed levels in silos and can supplement intake control.
vii. Water meters can be installed in modern poultry buildings to monitor daily water use by row or house.
viii. The simplest way to control environmental conditions is to regulate ventilation and heating to maintain the optimum temperature. - Fan ventilating systems with side inlet ventilation provide greater temperature and relative humidity control than natural ventilation.
x. Point lasers can excite avian curiosity and increase feed consumption without harming leg health.
xi. Using an appropriate spectrum can effectively decontaminate surfaces against Salmonella.
xii. This approach has the advantage of not causing temperature variations to the eggs during disinfection and allowing for low humidity.
Conclusion
Precise management enables farmers to take reliable, real-time, and non-invasive measures of avian behavior and physiology by using a variety of technologies. Automated systems for assessing physiological and behavioral indicators can give essential benefits and tools for maximizing chicken welfare by offering better alternatives for evaluating bird health and response, hence reducing production losses. This is the hope of applying innovative farm management techniques that would provide high-quality, safe food to customers. Precision poultry technologies are still in the early stages of development and adoption at the farmer level.
References:
F.L.S. Castro, L. Chai, J. Arango, C.M. Owens, P.A. Smith, S. Reichelt, C. DuBois, A. Menconi.2023. Poultry industry paradigms: connecting the dots. Journal of Applied Poultry Research 32(1): 1056-6171.
Olejnik K, Popiela E, Opaliński S. Emerging Precision Management Methods in Poultry Sector. Agriculture. 2022; 12(5):718
