Executing the feed budget is tough!

An issue on proper bin switching caught my attention earlier today.  What I am talking about is on farms with tandem bins installed the standard practice is to run Bin 1 empty with Bin 2 slide shut, open Bin 2 slide and close bin 1 slide, deliver feed to Bin 1 with slide shut, run Bin 2 empty, open Bin 1 slide and shut bin 2 slide, order feed for bin 2.  Repeat.  In reality this can be very difficult to do.  Bins can run empty in the middle of the night so barn workers will switch slides before they go home for the night.  They forget to close the empty slide the next morning and pretty soon the bin situation is chaos.

One of the farms I am monitoring I noticed a couple days ago that on one of the tandem bin groups we had the feed emptying out of the same bin two times in a row.  When you look at the chart from the bin sensors you can see it clearly.

A couple things are contributing to the mayhem on this site:

• Many of the feed deliveries have come in feed on feed causing problems.  If you look at Bin 21 in the chart above, you can tell that since the turn began the feed has yet to show below the low sensor (which is in the bin's cone).  We need to get bins 100% empty before putting new deliveries on top of them...especially early in the turn.  The feed on feed deliveries is also contributing to feed flow issues.  
• The feed flow issues are causing ratholing and side-sticking of the feed in the bins making it much more difficult to visually estimate inventory causing poor ordering.
• The primary barn manager has been out nursing a broken wrist (non-work related) so we have had fill-in workers on site.  This makes it harder to keep track of where the bins are at on deliveries and which one should be pulled from.

I believe feed outages are probably the biggest contributor to poor ADG and feed efficiency in animals.  I would be very interested in figuring out how a well executed feed budget versus a poor or average executed feed budget compares performance wise.  Fresh feed and the correct feed at the right time should make a big difference in how well a group of animals performs.  On this particular farm, we have not done a very good job so far on executing the budget but we are determined to turn it around over the next 90 days.  I hope its not too little too late.

Short term solution:

• Order feed remotely (already done)
• Completely empty feed bins before taking new feed deliveries.
• Generate email to barn manager daily (have software create email) on which bin slides should be open and which should be shut.  The algorithm will be rather simple.  Whichever bin had a feed delivery longer ago but is not in an empty state is the slide that should be open.
• Try and determine the performance difference between poor and excellent tandem bin and feed budget execution.

Longer term solution?

Can software and a bin slide open/close device solve?  Probably.  Just take the person on the farm with 100 other things to worry about and manage right out of it.  FarmStreams currently does not send any commands back into the barn; but we could.  Grovestreams is already capable of sending commands back out through its API.  The communications hub can receive commands and act upon them in the barn.  A google search shows that ChoreTime has developed this device already which hooks into their controller.  I have never been on a pig or poultry farm that had it installed so I can't say how it work but I will be looking into it.  Perhaps this or something similar could be something worth looking at including in the FarmStreams suite of solutions.