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.

Invest in process improvement not band-aids

Technology enables improved process management.  Process management is the antidote to common issues in the industry.  Often times producers will take steps to reduce issues by dealing with the symptoms of the problem.  For example, installing larger feed bins or bigger feeders on the site.  That can help reduce problems but won't solve and is massively more expensive than implementing process-focused technology.  Livestock farming is one of many industries that can adopt M2M / IoT systems to improve existing processes in an organized and meaningful way.

Some ways we are doing this is with:

• Feed management.  Ordering feed, tandem bin management, feed outages, and intake analysis are some ways we can impact an existing process that some producers struggle with.
• Group management.  Farmstreams app collects placements, mortalities, marketing and other customizable data entry streams. 
• Medication / antibiotic tracking.
• Environmental alerting. Water usage, temperature and air quality.
• Deeper big data analytics.

Within the industry commonly approaches to deal with issues are to go bigger.  For example, when feed bins running out of feed it is often suggested to spend the capital to upgrade to larger feed bins on the site.  When digging into the results of this investment - often results are a mixed bag.  It is nearly as common for feed to run out when larger feed bins are used as smaller ones.  Barn workers have a false sense of security with all that feed capacity on site and the bins run out even in tandem.  Or both slides are left open and both bins run open catching the worker by surprise.  It happens frequently.  If the process isn't fixed, the problem isn't fixed.

I have been at a layer facility where tandem bins 36 tons each were sitting within the line of sight of the feed mill no more than 1/2 mile away.  The bins would run empty and be waiting on feed from the mill.  

That much capacity also makes it very difficult for industries, like egg layers, who might want to change nutrition quickly to do so.  You have to go through 4 days of feed before you can change the ration when that much is on site.

More feed capacity inside the barn is another common solution to feed outages.  Without a doubt it is helpful but expensive.  It also doesn't guarantee that there are not times when feed is not flowing and that bunk is not full.  

One last comment, process improvement and band-aids come in waves.  Process improvements made today will make waves that result in even more process improvements in the future.  Band-aids work the same way, a 24 ton bin today becomes 36 tons in a few years.  You have to keep making the band-aid bigger and bigger, they don't get smaller.

More feed line problems (setting delay timers)

Once we start gathering more and more feed data and keeping in the store we can go back and look at some interesting things.  We have already posted about alerts to solve feed problems, such as feed outages, bin rotations, and feed ordering, and what we can do to help solve them. This morning I decided to go back and look at frequency of feed events and discovered some alarming problems which we went over this morning with the site owner and are fixing.

In my analysis, I found that on some feed lines, the Feedmeter was reporting feed events very frequently, sometimes every minute.  See the underlying data in the store below:

In 18 minutes, we reported 16 feed events.  When I roll up the data to a day and also look at the sum, average, sample count I see the following data.

Several issues for us to work through here.

1.  At that small of a run time the Feedmeter is set up to fail.  A key variable in the Feedmeter's algorithm is the run time.  If a setting is off causing the start to end run time to be off by 0.25 seconds, it is rounding error on a 60 second run; but catastrophic on a 1.25 second run.  The Feedmeter's ability to estimate intake is not optimal.

2.  Feed motor life expectancy is slightly reduced for every time the motor runs.  A motor that runs 500 times a day versus 50 times a day probably will go bad much faster.  I did a quick inquiry with some equipment sales guys in town and a typical motor life is 5-6 years and costs $225 to replace.  Moisture (see future blog post about humidity sensors), feed quality and frequency of running will cause them to go bad faster.  

3.  Feed motors failing cause feed outages.  Without a full suite of monitoring it is easy not to recognize this problem until it is later than you would like.  By the time it is fixed, the feed outage has likely cost you money and hurt your animals.

So how does it happen?  Its a tough job and barn workers forget about it.  Perhaps a line didn't start in the past and the barn worker blames the delay timer and shuts it off.  There is a lot of things to train and its possible the barn worker was never trained in how to use the delay timers.

We could set alerts around delay timers if we wanted to it would be very easy.  Simply take the current value's timestamp in the store minus the previous value's timestamp in the store and see if it exceeds a minimum delay timer value.  If it doesn't send an alert.  I always hate having pointless, repetitive low-value alerts so I would be more prone to having a once a week check.  Grovestreams does a very good job of allowing you to add unlimited intelligence to the alerting engine.  Perhaps in this case put in the software to look at the average time between feed runs for the past week or count the total feed runs and alert if it exceeds a certain value.  

In addition, monitor your whole site for feed.  If a barn worker is worried about the line starting up on a delay timer we have an alert for that out of the box.  

In conclusion, putting a cost on improper settings on a feed line is nearly impossible and not that large in the grand scheme of things.  The bigger issue is the cost of poor on-site management to livestock operations.  If barn workers are not setting delay timers properly it is an indication of poor management which likely have bigger ramifications throughout that site's production.

What is a farm stream?

FarmStreams collects, stores, organizes, analyzes and displays data from livestock farms.  In our world a stream is a piece of data collected from a sensor, person or piece of software.  The data is stored in the cloud using the latest Big Data structures.  Grovestreams is a very powerful platform and analytics engine that we use to mashup the data in the cloud.  

Examples of remote sensors:

• bin level sensors to estimate feed bin level
• feed line sensors to estimate feed flowing through a flex auger
• water meters to estimate water consumption
• air temperature sensor
• humidity sensor
• CO2 sensor
• weight scales to get bird or hog weights
• door open/shut to estimate how many hours a day laborers are at the site

Example of data that can be collected from people:

• FarmStreams mobile app collects data visible by people on the site, like: 
• mortalities
• medications
• health conditions
• water (if sensors are not available)
• temperature (if sensors are not available)  
• feed bin estimates (if sensors are not available)
• customizable inputs for each operation

The app can be found here for downloading: 

       Android http://tinyurl.com/mqgskr3

       Apple http://tinyurl.com/pclejlh

Lastly, we can create streams from software, such as:

• day, week, etc. of turn
• Animal inventory and subsequently feed/animal, water/animal, cost/animal
• Estimated budget intake based on feed curve
• Weight estimates, market prediction dates
• Feed inventory and feed ordering predictions

The data platform can analyze each and every one of these streams for alert conditions for immediate action.  Totally customize-able to each producer's needs with time filters (only alert certain times of day).  Different people in an organization can receive different alerts.  Examples could include:

• feed outage, alerts site manager that the animals are not getting feed
• water / animal decreases or increases compared to previous 2, 3, 4, or 5 days.
• feed bin is empty
• temperature is too hot / cold
• many many more 

View the streams in real time, summarized by second, minute, hour, day, week, month, or turn.  Charts and graphs quickly show the data needed.  Customize-able charts and graphs provides users maximum value with their data streams.  Users with an intermediate or higher understanding of Excel of Sequel query can develop powerful real time tools in our platform.

Follow our blog!  In the coming posts we will dive into different sensors and observations from the world of animal agriculture.  We will have technical and industry experts contribute.  The internet of things has impacted many industries.  In the world of agriculture, crop agriculture more so than animal ag.  the livestock side of ag has big opportunities for improved processes by combining cloud connected sensors, data from people and software.