Mansson uses fast-growing trees to provide shelter from predators.
Operations manager Claus Rasmussen (l), Poultry Plan ex- pert Pieter Brons and data analyst Helena Hjortshøj take a deep dive into the farm data.
near future. I would like all of Denmark to be organic. It would be great if we were to be known as an organic country out in the wider world.” Axel believes that eventually organic pro- duction will form the basis for our existence.
Data integration Actual growth of the poultry side of Mansson’s started some ten years ago but it didn’t take too long before they realised that the Excel datasheets that they used had reached their limits. Operations manager Rasmussen: “The sheer volume of data from 16 houses (under 8 roofs) made it hard to get to the bottom of what we were doing. Yes, you could do a deep dive into a problem, but it always took a lot of time and often it was reactive instead of proactive.” With a workforce of 15, mostly foreign, employees in the houses, structured and inte- grated data streams were needed to keep on top of perfor- mance parameters. “I have to be able to trust the data that comes from the houses because I cannot check all the birds myself. If I am lucky, I get around the whole farm once a week.” That brought Mansson’s to invest in new Poultry Plan software. This cloud-based ERP platform aggregates all the relevant production parameters and displays them in a handy dashboard overview. Rasmussen: “Most importantly, the sys- tem will give us an alert when something is off. To give an ex- ample, we now get alerted and are able to act immediately if feed intake and bird weight are out of bounds. In the past we
For first six months of 2022 a housing order was in place in Denmark which meant that the birds could only access the covered wintergarten.
would only look for issues if we saw a drop in egg production: too little, too late. With Poultry Plan we are definitely playing closer on the ball.”
Next level Mansson’s operations manager wants to maintain control and that is precisely where the software helps. Rasmussen: “Given our scale of production, information is key. We want to per- form to the best of our ability and that’s why we have taken control of our pullets with a newly-built rearing house where we can raise all the pullets for our whole operation. Enlarging your area of control: that is the name of the game, with rear- ing and with software implementation.” One advantage Poul- try Plan brings is the ability to compare and benchmark pa- rameters with one click of the mouse. “As a farm, we constantly want to improve our performance. Therefore, we usually house multiple layer breeds, currently Lohmann Lite and Classic and Dekalb White, and we test different feed com- positions. With the software, we can constantly benchmark the flocks to compare them each other and the breeding standard, and to make smart informed choices, going for- ward.” With trials, testing and running a tight ship, Mansson’s is currently operating to its own standards. “We are no longer benchmarking against the breed-specific standards alone but are comparing flock to flock, as well. Constantly improving on our own progress really takes us to the next level.”
▶ POULTRY WORLD | No. 5, 2022 11
PHOTO: FABIAN BROCKÖTTER
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