Sensor Spotlight: Temperature

Air temperature is a very important measurement in hog and poultry barns around the world, impacting animal health, feed consumption and growth.  Every single barn controller system I am aware of has temperature readings which control various heating/cooling/ventilation equipment to maintain the optimal temperature within the barn.  Most of these controller systems either do not store the information or keep it locally which is not helpful for analytics.  Many producers also likely pay for an alerting service which temperature is likely a variable that is alerted upon if it is too high or too low.

Logging the temperature data in the cloud can be very valuable.  By connecting an existing controller to a cloud service like Grovestreams (which will be possible with the MultiSense Plus soon to be available) or by installing independent temperature sensors you now have that data logged forever.  You can simply produce charts which show the temperature over time, the average/high/low for a day over time or a variety of display options.  This is generally easy stuff for most data platforms to handle.  GroveStreams does it well; but so do others.

What we can do in FarmStreams using the GroveStreams platform is far more in-depth.  

One area is in the alerting engine.  Most alert systems are set up to be very simple.  Is it higher than a high threshold, call.  If its lower than a low threshold call.  A basic alert protocol in our alerting engine could be to set different thresholds based on the age of the animal.  At day 7, 92 degrees is the high threshold, at day 60, 84 degrees is the high threshold.  Other more involved alerts could include feed intake, if temperature is below 50 degrees in the barn and the animals have consumed over 6 pounds of feed in the last 24 hours.  That also could be a sliding scale: ex 3 pounds when they are 7 days old, 6 pounds when they are 67 days old.  It could be an alert based upon a percentage over or below budget also tied to temperature.  I am not saying these are practical alerts to execute; just showcasing how complex an alert condition could be set up as in our platform.

In addition to the more in-depth alerts we also can do some real interesting analytics with all of the data points.  Since we have accurate hourly intake information we can easily compare very granular actual versus budget for different temperature levels.  We can use time-filters to look at consumption at different times of the day actual vs budget across an entire system for different temperature levels in the barn.  I am not suggesting this is a priority task to do today or even next year.  As we have documented earlier, simple execution of feed orders and bin switching are low-hanging fruit to tackle now.  But for hardcore analytics like myself, it is easy to see how when a major livestock production system decides to adopt a Big Data IoT initiative the separation from the pack will be swift.  The way in which this industry leader will separate is through the process verification tools, like we have been talking about on the blog - which impacts things on the monitoring and total quality management side; but also from the robust and powerful analytics engine like GroveStreams on the data benchmarking side.  In my humble opinion this will quickly separate them as a low-cost, high-quality producer.

In conclusion, capturing and storing temperature data is very easy.  It is a very important part of hog and poultry operations in terms of animal health, feed intake and growth.  FarmStreams can 

• capture the information down to the second if so desired, 
• store it, 
• send it to your enterprise level system as a raw value or calculated value at customized intervals, 
• chart it, 
• perform simple or complex alerts, 
• engage in some hardcore analytics/benchmarking (in real time).  

In a data hungry industry this is far superior to sitting on a controller in the barn.  In my next blog post I will show how we created another weaker (but cheaper) solution for uploading the data via the FarmStreams mobile app.