PHOTO: BART NIJS
PHOTO: HANS PRINSEN
INNOVATIVE FARMING ▶▶▶
House comput- ers are standard but connecting them to all farm management systems is less common.
Sensors, such as smart cameras, can be linked to- gether to moni- tor bird move- ment and automatically issue an alert when attention is needed.
industry, too. In a study on Hyline brown layers in a conven- tional cage system, acoustic detection along with computer algorithms were able to detect stress and classify it as physi- cal or mental with 96.2% accuracy. Further studies have demonstrated that acoustic data can be used to detect pul- monary disease in poultry and even detect detrimental feath- er pecking in layers. Image analysis also offers a method of constant non-invasive monitoring – viewed with Tibot, Octopus Robotics and
Poultrybot – which utilise image analysis as well as robotic systems, though these have focused on the broiler sector. “There have also been developments in using infra-red ther- mology to assess temperature changes in hens, to alert to illness and detect feather coverage/damage. Optical flow im- age analysis techniques can predict which flocks will com- mence damaging feather pecking activities several weeks in advance, allowing controls to be put in place.”
Radio frequency identification Radio frequency identification chips are currently used in the cattle and sheep sectors in the UK as an identification method, but Dr Cutress notes that it could also have a major role in the poultry industry: “Due to defined boundaries with- in hen houses, it has been suggested that RFID could act as a localisation or monitoring tool, whereby communication from a passive RFID tag on the ankle of a hen with a fixed ac- tive RFID receiver could, for example, provide data that a hen had visited a feed or water station. RFID could be utilised for weighing birds in nesting situations or at feeders to look at growth patterns and signal individual health concerns. It has already been incorporated into a nest box system, enabling accurate recording of individual bird egg-laying statistics and offering opportunities to improve productivity, by managing specific birds or culling unproductive animals.”
16 ▶ POULTRY WORLD | No. 7, 2020
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