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.

Recording mortalities

The original purpose of why we created the FarmStreams mobile app was because we needed an easy way to upload daily mortalities into Grovestreams.  This was important because animal inventory was needed to run certain ratios, such as water/pig or feed/chicken.  Recording mortalities and keeping track of inventory is a task that is done today on paper or a local computer at nearly every farm.  Typically the barn worker calls or faxes in the results once a week to an office somewhere that enters them into a spreadsheet or database.

As the mobile app evolved we began adding more features that people wanted.  But its origin truly was only to give us a way to easily enter mortalities into Grovestreams for record keeping and as required for the analytics engines.

Here is how the mortalities work:

Step 1, open the app.

Step 2, click the "Mortalities" icon

Step 3, select the group the mortality occurred in, the date and enter the found / euth.

The app then uploads the data via API transfer into Grovestreams where we can do all sorts of things with it.  Some examples:

• Keep a running count of mortalities and inventory.  
• Push the data into an enterprise level system through the API Transfer
• Chart mortality %

• Chart mortality % versus budget

• Although I have not accomplished this yet it would be fairly easy to benchmark and chart each site's mortality against the entire system's mortality based upon the day/week in the turn.

• Accurately update various ratios such as: water gallons / pig with current inventory each day.

• Generate alerts from the mortality data.  For example, 
• alert when mortality goes above the budget and stays there for more than 7 consecutive days.
• alert when no mortalities are entered for 7 or more days.
• alert when more than 1% of the population is reported in a 3 day period.

I am outlining a lot of complicated reports and alerts that can be generated just to show readers the robustness of the system we have developed.  In reality, most producers just want a way to submit mortalities from their cell phone or tablet and easily view the running total online or get the data into their own enterprise level system easier or faster.  We are working on getting the running total back into the mobile app; but don't have that piece developed yet.  Stay tuned.

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.