Monitor access to buildings

Access to barns and recording the access is more important today than ever before.  Biosecurity and monitoring labor are just two of the reasons it makes sense to have a basic understanding of the coming and goings of people at the farm site.  I have put together using a basic door sensor a system that can provide quite a bit of insight into a farm's activity and compare to other similar farm's activity for benchmarking purposes.

Certainly I realize that this is a fairly low-cost monitoring system.  Undeniably there are bigger and better ways to monitor exactly who is coming and going and at exactly what time.  You could retina or fingerprint scan workers like 007 movies but at what cost?  You could have card scanners but then look at the expense of installing that for one or two workers.  What if they forget their card or lose it?  Often the "home office" is far away and the logistics of getting a new card could take days.  Or a substitute needs to go to the site who doesn't have a card?  A simple low-cost employee monitoring device could be the solution.

Here is what I did.

I installed a simple door sensor that sends a count of how many seconds the door is open in 5 minute intervals for each time it is opened.  That information is then sent to Grovestreams where I am doing some simple analysis with it that provides me with some excellent information.

Data #1.  I get the first time of the day that the door was opened up.  This is huge.  If the employee is supposed to be at the site at 6am and they regularly arrive at 9am that is a problem.  

The image above shows activity on a system that monitors a door at my office.  Grovestreams allows for an easy way to determine the first and last timestamp of activity received for the day and shows it in a dashboard.

In addition I can take the last timestamp and subtract the first and get an estimate of the time the site was occupied for the day.  

I also chart this for quick viewing (guess I haven't been to the office at all in the last few days):

Interesting alerts on this.

1.  Send an alert to email or phone on the first arrival every day.

2.  Send an alert to email or phone on activity outside of a time filtered period.  Example send an alert for every activity outside the hours of 6am to 6pm.

3.  Send an email at 12:01am if the duration of the previous day was less than 4 hours.

4.  Same alert as #3 except for exclude weekends.

Expanded analysis:

Many sites have multiple barns.  As part of the Multisense sensor gateway users could add door sensors to each barn entrance and managers could track how much time is spent in each of the barns on the site.  Alerts for barn doors left open would be simple to include as part of any package as well.

Grovestreams and Multisense make prototyping IoT projects simple and low cost.  This door sensor project took me hardly any time or money and now I think this could be used in barns all around to monitor employee time.

Tracking medication use on the farm

Medication use, specifically antibiotics on the farm are a spotlight issue for animal agriculture.  Consumers, restaurants, retailers and politicians are joining the discussion.  Traceability is a common buzzword that is heard on medications at the farm.  This is a particularly difficult issue to install an iot solution around because of the intrinsic need for people to execute at the ground level.  Since we are not medicating animals daily, it is not a part of the daily routine, which makes it more difficult to train people to execute these important processes.  We think the data platform and mobile app we have developed can help.  Here is what we are doing in FarmStreams:

The mobile app allows two different type of updates:

1.  A QR code or NFC type system where medications are bar-coded or QR coded before going to the farm.  Each doser or medicator in the farm site is also bar coded or NFC coded.  A barn worker would scan in the medicine, verify its correct.  Enter the amount.  Then scan the doser at the water line before setting it.  Repeat same process for stopping the medicine only just scan the doser code and STOP.

Some snapshots of what that looks like is below:

   

2.  If the QR/barcode/NFC type system is too complex we also have the option to just have the barn worker use the app to select from a drop-down menu what and where they are adding meds to the water.  Enter the amount.  When finished stop the medication in the app.

The mobile app can also be set up to do other process verification steps such as:

1.  Have the vet dispatch instructions for a specific group to be given a specific medication and a specific amount by a certain time.

2.  Send customized and frequently updated instructions/messages for the selected medication.  Withdrawal days, mixing instructions, other pertinent data that may not be on the bag itself.

3.  An email can be sent to the vet notifying them the medication event began / ended.

4.  If the medication event has not occurred within a specific timeframe then an alert notifying the vet and supervisor is also sent.

The mobile app cannot ensure that the medication that was entered into it actually got into the water and to the animals.  These processes break down quickly when you don't have participation from the workforce.  We have discussed labor quality previously in the blog.

On the sensor side most of the dosers in the market today do not have cloud connectivity or even local data storage.  This often makes people throughout the organization blind to what is going on inside the farm.  If there are issues like plugged diaphragms they must be troubleshot and recorded by the worker on site.  Data quality is often compromised and not uniformly gathered.

There are newer doser products that are sold at Farm Tech Store that connect to the cloud using the MultiSense sensor gateway.  These measure water consumption, medications injected (how much and when) to the cloud.  When combined with the data entered in the mobile app, you have a report of exactly what went in the water, how much and at what times.  Critical streams needed for a good traceability program.

One issue that is not resolved yet is having that medicine / medicator handshake on what product is going into the water.  You still need a human to enter that data, a potential weak link in the data chain.  In the future some type of cartridge or other medication reading technology may be placed within the medicator hardware; but for now that is futuristic thinking.  It can be done; but need someone to pay for it.

Another issue that is possible; but not practical today is to have the vet receive an email telling them that the medication is in the medicator ready to be inserted into the water.  The medicator can be started with an approval from the vet's mobile app.  100% possible, impractical to develop until someone says they want that level of control over their medications on the farm.

When we get over to the data side in Grovestreams this is where we can put some logic and alerts around checks / balances to ensure the processes are followed properly.

For example,

If a vet has dispatched a medication event, set an alert that lets you know if it has not been done within 4 hours in the barn.  Double check not only the app but also the medicator data stream.  The medication should be entered into the app and flowing to animals within X hours or vet/supervisor are being alerted.

Once the medication has started check to see if it has stopped by X hours.  If it is still medicating after 48 hours for example, send an alert or if medicator is set up to be turned on/off remotely, turn off remotely either with software or with an app.

Cross reference other data in the store.  If a specific medication shouldn't be given to birds greater than 24 pounds.  Check that, cross reference it.  If its greater, send an alert.

Produce reports that document how much and over what times were medications given by barn.  Further analytics from the feed sensors, scales and water lines would dive into whether they were effective and possibly deliver payback scenarios in real-time.

There is technology that can help organize the process around medications on the farm.  However there is not an easy button.  It still requires 100% buy-in throughout the organization in the value of the data and a commitment to the process.

Monitoring employee's time - Trust but Verify

Ask most livestock producers what the biggest difference between a high performing site and a low performing site and they would tell you the on-farm labor.  Sites with good managers perform well, sites with poor management perform poorly.  FarmStreams entire business exists because of this fact.  Drilling deeper a good indicator of management quality would be the amount of time an employee is on the site.  A 45 minute walk-through and leave is going to have different results than a site that has an employee on site for 10 hours each day.  Its just common sense.

One of the benefits of using FarmStreams is that we can watch over all of the systems for a farm worker while they are gone in a much more intelligent way than the existing alarm systems in the marketplace.  Its almost like extending the management time on a site with software and advanced automation instead of a person.  Its a tough concept to embrace; but it can really be true particularly in systems where the labor force is stretched thin or even the supervisor level is stretched thin allowing workers to take shortcuts because they know that they have a good chance of getting away with it.

So what is our solution?

First, monitor the entire site to ensure all systems are working at all times.  We talk about this at length in the blog and will continue talking about ways we do this.

In addition, install sensors such as door sensors or motion detectors in common areas.  Collect the information and transmit it to the cloud via the MultiSense sensor gateway.  The calculations would be very easy.  Last timestamp in epoch millis minus the first timestamp in epoch milis converted to a decimal hour should be a pretty accurate time on site.  The full suite of alerts for an upper manager would be available.  Less than a certain threshold triggers an alert.  Fully customizable.  Also the full reporting/dashboard graphs would also be available.

I have had personal experience with some barn workers and its often hard to believe them as much as I want to.  When we have feed problems on the site they are never there.  They left an hour ago.  They weren't planning to come until 3pm today, whatever the situation might be 9am or 6pm the story is the same.  Like any business you have good employees and you have bad employees.  I would not say that me calling them and them not being near the site means they are bad.  It could be coincidence.  However if the monitoring sensor kept track of human activity on the site each day you now have a way to go back and know what is going on with that employees time.

As one industry exec recently told me.  Trust, but Verify

Entering Temperature in Mobile App

In my last blog entry, we identified temperature sensors as being a low-cost sensor providing valuable information to barn workers, managers and analysts in a livestock operation.  If installing sensors and connecting them to the cloud is not in the cards but the data would be valuable to collect perhaps the mobile app is a worthwhile option.

Select the temperature icon from the customize-able list of options.

Select the Group reporting.  This is a drop-down based upon groups your user-id has access to update.  Timestamp is set at the current timestamp, cannot be edited in the standard option.  Then an decimal entry field for low (required), average (not required) and high (required).  Most barn controllers will have options for a user to look at the previous day's high and low reading.

Once the data is collected in the cloud, charts showing the data over time are standard.  Other analytics are also possible as we discussed in the last blog entry.

The mobile app option is an improvement over just leaving the data in the barn on the controller.  Some of the improvements are:

1.  A requirement for the barn workers to look at the temperature every day.

2.  Getting the data into the cloud gives you flexibility and centralization to your process improvements efforts.  Also an ability to correlate data to other interesting data like feed, water, and mortalities to name a few.

3.  If barn workers are not doing the work each day, you can structure alerts around missing data.  If a barn worker does not enter temperature for 30 hours an alert goes to their direct supervisor.  If 72 hours passes it escalates to a manager.  Rapid feedback of compliance issues.

The mobile app still has some potential flaws, including:

1.  Barn workers may falsify data entries if it makes them look bad.  Difficult to prosecute.

2.  Actionable alerts are delayed versus real time sensor data.

In conclusion, logging temperature data in a mobile app is a low-cost step for well-run producers to more easily collect on-farm data into the cloud for analytics or push into their own enterprise systems.  For poorer managed sites, it is a step in the right direction for behavior and process improvement.  FarmStreams mobile app runs on both Android and IOS.  Contact us to set up your site today.

Feed inventory in mobile app

We discussed using various sensors to estimate on farm feed inventory in the last blog entry.  Several different sensors are on the market, we prefer the BinLogic sensor for its simplicity and cost.  Whatever sensor is used, getting the data into Grovestreams for analytics/alerting is crucial.  However, in some cases some farms may still want the person at the farm to climb bins each week or several times a week and take a feed inventory and report it more efficiently to the feed mill or management.  Even if bin sensors are installed it may be valuable to also get physical inventory entries on the site pushed into the data store.

Here is how it works.  The Farmsteams mobile app allows for a user to submit feed inventory based on a visual assessment of the feed bins on the farm.  The app has been programmed to allow setting up to 10 feed bins for each group housing unit.  Any more would be a custom programming request.  A user on the farm must submit feed inventory for all feed bins in the group during a single submission.  This ensures the most accurate data in the data store.  A screenshot of the app's interfact is shown:

The FarmStreams mobile app (which can be downloaded here:) 

       Android http://tinyurl.com/mqgskr3

       Apple http://tinyurl.com/pclejlh

Pros/Cons.

Pros:

1.  Writing down and calling/faxing in later has flaws.  Timing may be off, people lose their scribblings, the person answering the phone might not be available, etc.  Entering in the mobile app as it happens reduces lost communications and bad data.

2.  Grovestreams alerting engine allows us to set alerts around timing of entries.  If the rule is once a week to take an inventory, management can get an alert to their email on the 8th day without an entry.  Easier to manage than reviewing a spreadsheet or scribblings in an office.

3.  Phone calls and faxes are difficult to track for employee performance.  The database is set up to keep track of all the times it was entered but also can be set up to track all the times it was supposed to be entered but wasn't.  This can be included in the report at the end of the turn.

4.  Software streams can produce graphical feed curves, compare to a budget range, estimate feed orders, etc.  An example graphical feed curve chart that looks like below can be produced and delivered via email daily/weekly/etc. or accessed in real time by logging into the platform and viewing your dashboards.

Cons:

1.  People don't always climb the bins, perhaps they throw a rock or just guess.  Climbing the bins in January isn't fun.

2.  Feed, particularly mash feed is very difficult to estimate visually.  It doesn't always flow evenly and peering down the top of a bin can be visually tricky.  The bin sensors like BinLogic and ultrasonic have similar issues; but at least their error factors should be relatively consistent.  Meaning that a 1/2 ton discrepancy from actual is consistent every reading which minimizes the noise in the reading data and can be dealt with in software.

3.  May be difficult to enforce at some sites (likely your worst performers).  If they are not climbing bins now giving them an app and asking them to do it isn't going to change that.  Perhaps with the Farmstreams mobile app and the powerful back-end data system, management could implement incentive programs with measurable performance standards.

Strategy: Installing bin sensors is the best; but if that is not possible entering the inventory in a mobile app is better than the way it is normally done of calling or faxing data in.  If a user is not ready to go all the way with fully integrated sensor systems the mobile app can be a great way to get started collecting important information from the farm site and using cloud-based Big Data technology to find value in your livestock operation.

Dealing with Feed Interruptions

I woke up this morning and saw an email alert from a hog site that we had a feed line hung up and was running continuously in an empty state since about 2am the night before.  This is an indication of a feed interruption.  Grovestreams alerting engine has several different ways it processes alerts, which is nice because over-alerting is a big issue in remote monitoring applications.  Grovestreams has thought of this and has functions such as dwell, latency, time-filters and other factors to eliminate unwanted alerts and only gives you the ones you need.

The way our system is set up is that the gateway sends a message to Grovestreams every 15 minutes that this running empty feed line state is being met.  Upon arrival in the database, I get an email notifying me of the situation, reminding me every 15 minutes until the situation is eradicated.

This past weekend we had several issues like this.  2 on Saturday and 1 on Sunday.  It seems to happen most frequently when the tandem bins are being switched.  Indications of poor feed flow.  The barn manager believes the feed is ground to fine and doesn't flow properly.  Yours truly climbed each of the 12 feed bins on site and saw for myself feed clumping to the side of the bins and not flowing.  I even took a short youtube video to document what I was seeing in one of the bins.  In the video you can also see my high and low sensors.

One item worth noting on this issue at this site that gives me some pause before suggesting a coarser grind or a bin-beater is the solution to our feed flow issues:

1.  The bins are not being completely emptied between deliveries.  These pigs are still relatively small, 90 lbs.  Going through perhaps 2-3 tons per day per group.  The barn manager who is scared to run out of feed is ordering feed very aggressively and this has resulted in delivering feed on top of feed often.  See the chart below which represents a high and a low sensor in the bin.  100 means the bin is completely full of feed.  50 means its somewhere in the middle and 0 means feed is below the cone.  If you look at my video you can see about how it is laid out.

This shows me that since the turn started in July, one of the feed bins in the tandem set has not emptied below the cone before receiving the next order of feed.  This is potentially disrupting the nutrition plan and possibly contributing to feed flow issues.  Old feed clumps easier and doesn't flow.  Additionally, logistics issues arise when the feed in the truck doesn't fit in the bin it belongs to.  All breakdowns in the feed process which add cost.

Solutions:  

1.  Monitor feed flow issues, document what the cause is potentially include a feed flow documentation module to the mobile app.  

2.  Fix feed ordering.  Ordering feed is not an easy task for a barn manager.  There are many factors to consider and timing it correctly to fit the feed mill's schedule is not a simple task.  Going forward, having the software manage the feed ordering will improve that process a great deal.  By fully emptying the bins we can know for certain that older feed is not clogging the bin from flowing properly.  Grovestreams uses data from all types of streams - sensors, app, and software which gives us a remarkably accurate estimate of feed on site and predictions on when it may go empty.