Feed alerting solves costly problems.

In previous blog posts we talked about how remote monitoring can have provide the tools needed for precise feed ordering and feed budget execution.  We have also talked about feed outages in previous blog posts.  In this blog entry I will show you the ways that we handle alerts as it relates to feed.  We have several already set up standard out of the box.  In the coming weeks I will be adding some new alerts to the system.

Alert #1.  Line Empty.  The communication hub on farm is monitoring the Feedmeters on each line.  If it detects that a line is running for longer than a pre-set time (out of the box is 15 minutes) a message is sent to the cloud.  Every X minutes thereafter another message is sent and the Grovestreams alerting engine processes it and sends alerts when your alert conditions are met.  This is a very effective tool for knowing when a feed line is having issues on the farm.

In addition to the alerting, a calculated value counting the feed outages occurring during a turn will be a newly discovered KPI for livestock farms.  Furthermore, calculating the cost of feed outages with this data will begin to have more data behind it, potentially answering that question.

Alert #2.  Line Full.  This is a rare alert condition; but can happen.  This is when a tube or something in the barn comes loose and feed spills on the floor.  The Feedmeter can detect the difference between an empty and full line very well.

Alert #3.  Time between feed events.  Out of the box the setting is 5 hours but it can be customized. Grovestreams handles this issue very intelligently.  Using an interval stream, we look to see how many pounds of feed have been fed in a period of time, an hour but can be more granular if needed.  If the pounds is zero then add a 1 to the previous value.  Once the stream becomes equal to or greater than 5, send an alert.  In the alert settings, I set this to check in on the alert condition every hour and if the line still hasn't reported a feed event you are reminded of the issue.  This is an important function because on Alert #1 often times feed lines will time out after a period of time.  Alert #3 with the reminders makes sure that the issue is not forgotten.  

Furthermore on Alert #3 often times animals sleep at night.  This is particularly prevalent in turkey and poultry.  So, rather than getting alerts in the middle of the night that no feeding has occurred you simply set a time filter to ignore night time missed feed events.

The image below shows the previous 21 days of spikes in periods where a feed line has not run.  As you can see that overnights sometimes the pigs don't eat on this line until morning.  If the value exceeded 5 you would get an email.

Alerts 1-3 are problem alerts.  If these occur someone needs to fix it immediately.  

We also have other alerts that are possible and would be quite easy to model.  For example,

Concept #1 - Alerts around feed intake / animal as compared to a budget.  If the intake is different from the budget by X% an alert is sent, perhaps once a day or once a week.  It could even alert differently based upon how big the difference is from the budget.  

Concept #2 - Alerts around bin rotations, feed budget management.  Alert when the feed bins are not rotated properly.  We have identified these issues in previous blog posts.  Calculate how old feed is on site, perhaps you have some KPI's on that and we want to minimize age.

Concept #3 - Alerts around movements in feed intake.  This happens with every group of animals.  At some point they really take off and it can surprise you.  Their feed intake can jump up significantly and you run the risk of a bin running empty.  Run an alert to tell you when the previous day's intake differs from the previous 5 days by X% or more.  Investigate why that happened.

Concept #4 - Alerts around bin deliveries.  This can and will become more important as feed ingredient traceability becomes more important particularly when medications are in the feed.  Alert concepts here would include: If bin fill event occurs > X hours from feed production (API push from mill to Farmstreams).  Bin fill event occurs without a feed production event.  Anything that relates to exceptions in that handshake between the feed mill and the correct bin filling transaction is an alerting event.

In conclusion, the alerting engine has a lot of very useful tools for providing customized information to a user and weed out false alerts.  The first 3 alerts I identified that come standard with FarmStreams today are critical for livestock producers to have.  There are clear payback scenarios here and good management would require knowledge that animals have regular feed.  The others are provided to show you just how powerful our platform can be for advanced analytics.  Likely not immediate applications; but as we start improving the every-day management of barns by using tools like FarmStreams offers I am confident we will start diving into those details in the coming years.