In this age of digitization, digitalization, and automation, poultry farmers and poultry integrators must consider automating their operations, especially poultry houses, for several compelling reasons:
Improved efficiency - automation allows for streamlined, consistent, and predictable farming practices to occur. By reducing operational process variations, and ensuring various activities take place on time and constantly, a farmer can realize a betterment of flock performance. In other words, automated systems provide consistent care, ensuring that birds receive the prescribed/ideal level of nutrition, water, and environmental conditions at all times, no matter what.
Data mining, analysis, and monitoring - a quality automation system includes monitoring systems that provide real-time data on bird weights, feed utilization, bird health, environmental conditions, and other production metrics, enabling better decision-making. More advanced automation is also able to accurately forecast productivity and predict flock health situations.
Labor-related savings - fewer manual tasks mean a reduction in flock disturbance activities and at the same time enhance biosecurity. Automated systems minimize human interaction, reducing the risk of disease transmission and improving overall flock health while also reducing labor costs. Less reliance on the need for human interaction allows for easier and faster scalability too. Automated systems make it faster and easier to scale operations up or down based on demand and market conditions.
Reduced environmental impact - automation can help optimize resource use, such as water, feed, and electricity, leading to the practice having a smaller environmental footprint.
Greater compliance - automation helps ensure compliance with industry regulations by providing detailed accurate records of feed, water intake, in-house environmental conditions people and truck movement, and so on.
An even more advanced poultry farm automation system that also incorporates Gen AI, was recently launched by Agentis Innovations. In addition to providing all of the above, it is also able to provide benefits directly to the meat processing industry as well. For most poultry slaughter plants, the biggest challenges are either not receiving the correct weight of birds, or, receiving the correct average weight but the bird population's uniformity is poor. The key cause of these issues is primarily due to the fact that the weight information extracted at the farm is inaccurate as this data is collected periodically by manually weighing a sample of the bird population. Generating inaccurate weight data at the farm will mean that the farmer will not be able to take timely corrective measures to fix any flock weight and uniformity problem and also the processing plan will not be able to make timely adjustments to its processing plan.
To address this, Agentis Innovations has developed a plug-in module for its existing SmartFarmPro technology, named 'SmartCatcher'. SmartCatcher combines software and on-farm hardware technology which jointly provides reliable predictive data to the slaughter plant from the start of each flock. This data allows the catching planner and processing plant to choose and pick the farms that best suit their production plan and customer demand. Data collected, analyzed, and communicated by SmartCatcher includes; bird weights, bird number, flock CV, and flock uniformity by farm and by house. Having SmartCatcher can potentially help farmers and processing facilities save significant amounts of money by reducing giveaways (in the form of excess weight) and time to fulfill customer orders.
By implementing automation, poultry farmers and now poultry processors, can improve productivity, enhance animal welfare, and increase their overall profitability and at the same time do their part in reducing the industry's environmental impact and environmental footprint while producing an even better more nutritious product!
Want to know more about how SmartFarmPro and/or SmartCatcher can improve your operational efficiency and reduce operating costs?
Please contact Dr. Erfan at erfan@agentisinnovations.com or at +66 (0) 982811778
or Mr. Nimit at Nimit@agentisinnovations.com or at +66 (0) 645371650
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