Sensor Spotlight: Water Meters

Most of our discussion so far has been on the feed side of livestock agriculture: ordering properly, feed outages, feed budgets and overall execution of the feed side.  There is a lot of money left on the table in feed execution for a typical livestock producer, that is my belief.  Water consumption and air quality are right up there.  Water is something that can be monitored fairly easily and is growing in importance in a world that is more concerned about its water resources than ever before.  Monitoring can provide actionable alerts with payback as well as provide a lot of insight into animal health and should be a key performance indicator.

Basic Water Monitoring.

There are many different types of water meters in the market today.  Every barn I have been in has a water meter with a gallon count.  Most barn workers are required to write down the water reading each day, subtract from the previous day and attempt to keep track of daily water usage on a piece of paper at the barn.  Many water flow meters come with a digital, or pulse output, which can then be connected to a Multisense gateway and sent into the cloud.

Alerts.

Once the water reading is sent to the cloud it passes through the customize-able alert engine to determine if an alert condition has been met with the individual piece of data.  Furthermore, Grovestreams allows alert conditions to be set as data is aggregated, calculated or whatever you might wish to do with the data over time.  For example, a standard alert condition that I have set up for each water monitoring install is at 1201am, I look at the previous day total water / animal vs the previous 5 days average.  If that total is 90% or less or 110% or more it triggers an email alert.

I have not set it up; but a user could also check this total at different points of the day, perhaps at 10am it could be compared to the previous 5 days midnight to 10am total / animal.  Again at 4pm and finally at midnight.

A user may also wish to trigger an alert condition when so much water is flowing it can only be attributed to a leak.  If water consumption spikes > 500% in a given hour compared to the average hour.  Or if the barn manager wants to know if 50 gallons or more is recorded in an hour all of those alerts could be set up around water usage.

A 5 day water / animal average chart is shown below.  One day on Aug 4 there was a drop in water consumption by 9%.  I am not sure the cause.  Otherwise, most days have shown a 3-5% increase from the previous day.

Many users wish to see the data in a column chart versus the previous X days.  That can look something like this.  Or we can put it in a dashboard ready for viewing at any given time.

Payback opportunities.

With water there are quite a few payback opportunities that arise from having solid monitoring and analytics programs around it.  A few worth pointing out.

1.  Manure level and quality.  Water leaks or poor nipple settings that result in large quantities of water in the manure pit or on the poultry side in the litter can have costly consequences.

a.  With swine, having to empty a pit in the spring time is not ideal.  Even if a spring pumping is avoided, extra gallons to pump can add up.  Pumping manure pits is estimated to cost 1-2 cents per gallon.   50,000 additional gallons of water in the pit can cost $500-1000 annually.  Plus crop producers want to pay for nutrients, not water.  Diluted manure can be harmful to maximizing the value of your manure.

b.  With poultry, wet litter causes increased ammonia levels and a worse environment for the bird.  This can be costly to the production costs.

2.   Drops in water consumption can help a producer detect health challenges in a group.  Any tools that help detect health issues sooner can result in big savings for that group of animals.

3.  A serious malfunction like a well pump failure or leak that results in animals not getting water for a period of time can be very costly just like a feed outage can be.  The sooner that type of problem is identified and water is restored to the animals the more productive the animals will be.

Water meters themselves are not expensive.  Connecting them to the cloud/internet can be.  Installing water meters in addition to other sensors, such as bin sensors and feed line sensors is incrementally low-cost.

In conclusion, water meters are a proven well known technology.  Connecting them to the cloud and putting heavy analytics to the data is a logical next step for animal agriculture.  Particularly when water use in agriculture is a growing concern in many parts of the world.  Alerts that allow barn workers to fix leaked or broken water lines quickly can save money.  Trends that suggest health challenges can alert veterinarians to sick animals before it is too late.