What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine vision.
AI for Poultry
If we talk about the poultry industry, the use of Artificial Intelligence can help address many challenges, reduce human interference, improve the efficiency of farming and ultimately maximize the profit of a poultry farm. Let’s find out how AI will help in sustainable poultry farming!
- Drone Technology– Drones can be used to keep an eye on the chicks at all times. Drones photograph the bird at predetermined intervals throughout the day and send the images to the systems, which create a database for evaluating the flock’s behaviour. Drone data is fed into computer vision models, which are then used to comprehend the behaviour of domesticated birds.
- Detecting Avian Diseases– Aside from a high temperature, sick birds exhibit nasal and salivary secretions. The images from the drone are then sent into the system, which can detect the ailment early on. Because the condition is contagious, it results in lower production, therefore early detection aids poultry producers in preventing disease spread by administering the necessary medication to the birds or chicks. The computer models are designed for differentiating infected bird from a healthy bird by just noticing the nasal or oral secretion on the beak/mouth of a chicken.
- Detecting Behavioural Diseases-Machines can be trained to identify feather plucking in birds and its negative consequences. This also aids in the identification of damaged birds. Building a machine that alerts farmers about cannibalization in real time assures improved poultry yield. Pecking habit frequently causes laying hens to lose their plumage, which has a severe impact on the flock’s health. Pecking behavior often leads to the plumage of laying hens which has a negative impact over health of the flock, and under this situation death can occur within 10 minutes of pecking. Therefore early detection becomes essential.
- Farm Management– With the application of AI, farm management becomes less stressful. A vast quantity of data may be saved in cloud spaces with the use of computers, which can then be used by machines or robotics to manage characteristics like as humidity, temperature, and light. Robotics may be used to monitor a large number of factors that are important for farm management using Machine Learning. Artificial Intelligence can also process the data and after processing the result AI can be used for instant decision making thus improving efficiency of the Farm.
Vencomatic Agro Group
Vencomatic agro group, an agricultural business organization, provides poultry housing systems for broilers, layers and all types of birds. This agricultural group is convinced that the future to housing poultry birds, lies in software, data and Artificial Intelligence. The product manager Dennis Hoeks said, “Healthy animals mean less use of antibiotics, optimal feed conversion and optimal yields. We try to take modern poultry farmers a step further in their performance and we also try to reduce the global differences and thus contribute to a more sustainable sector.” He said “In the poultry industry you can measure all kinds of things with the help of, for example, sensor technology and vision technology, such as the size of eggs, the number of eggs, animal loss, feed consumption, barn conditions, climate, etc. You can link all that data, analyze it and use findings to optimize your processes”.
Conclusion
AI is projected to play an important role in the future development of the poultry industry by improving efficiency and accuracy at all levels. Artificial Intelligence has a lot of potential in the poultry business since it can solve a lot of problems that are difficult or impossible to address manually with the use of machines and robotics. In the last few years, many companies have started evaluating the use of AI at various levels of the value chain and have successfully adopted them.