Sensor Spotlight: Poultry Scale

Poultry scales are not new technology for chicken or turkey producers to incorporate in their live production operations.  Weighing birds has many advantages throughout the supply chain starting in the live production area (nutrition, vet services, etc) to finished production planning, sales and marketing and accounting.  Many stakeholders in a poultry production system have a need for accurate, timely live weights in the barn.

The average weight itself has some limit to its value.  It is valuable to understand nutrition and other factors from a learning and KPI standpoint.  The more frequent weights and accurate, frequent, surrounding data the more learning and improvement a system can gain.  What producers really want is an estimate of when a weight that triggers an event (like marketing) is going to be obtained.  Example: in 4 days the weight should be 6 pounds.  This is the crucial information needed for planning within an organization.

A quick google search shows many poultry scale options.  Any follower of this blog will know that FarmStreams is all about getting the data off the farm and into the cloud where it can be accessed and consumed by the users who need the information but are not going to the farm every day.

The FarmWeight VEIT Bat2 scale is a scale we have had success implementing with the FarmHub patform.  If a producer is already invested in a different type of scale a retrofit is possible; but this is one that we have successfully connected to the cloud and is ready to install today.

It offers the following features.

1.  Wireless connectivity to Grovestreams data platform.  Which can in turn be pushed into an enterprise system.

2.  Network multiple scales over a single connection point at a site.

3.  24/7 monitoring and reporting of the following:
a. average weight (male & female)
b. weight gain
c. number of samples

4. Alerting if certain weight related thresholds occur.  The thresholds can be variable and change with other data or time passing.

5. Data allows a producer to predict market dates.

Beyond just the single data points related to bird weights integrating with feed data, temperature, water usage and other data surrounding the environment of the barn in real-time in a powerful analytics engine like Grovestreams allows producers to glean new information to improve processes even further.

Similar to the other sensors, the data is valuable on its own as discussed above and can have even greater value as part of a larger more complex analytics program on the farm.