The image of painting eggs to be colourful for Easter is eternal: a tradition that can be traced back to paganism and Christianity, as a symbol of fertility, rebirth, and new life. Easter egg hunts became a practice from the 17th century onwards and today, are an essential celebration for the holiday. Thanks to the advent of IoT technology, connectivity and automation, poultry farming and hatchery management are improving efficiency and operations, ensuring that eggs continue to be delivered for Easter.
The key operational challenges for traditional egg farms that haven’t adopted some form of IoT include maintaining optimal environmental conditions – looking at the temperature, humidity, and CO2 – alongside early detection of disease, and animal welfare. Technologies ranging from hardware like sensors and microcontrollers to software such as Cloud platforms are addressing these challenges by collecting data which can be analysed later down the line to understand, for example, if one chicken is exhibiting early signs of disease.
A typical deployment might involve a sensor network where sensors are set up throughout the farm, data being sent to a microcontroller or Edge processor for faster processing, through a gateway and onto a Cloud platform for analysis. Key considerations for a setup need to look at latency versus reliability; the power budget for battery-operated sensors; and environmental protection.
Examples of this in practice include an egg farm based in Australia, Josh’s Rainbow Eggs, that implemented smart monitoring systems where both the chicken sheds and egg packing processes were automated. Some of the technology used were sensors that alerted when water ran out, sensors installed on silos, cameras installed in sheds, and temperature-controlled misters engineered to keep the sheds at a certain temperature during summer.
In another example, an egg farm in Chile was suffering from lower egg production compared with other farms and deployed a smart agriculture system designed by NHR which had wireless temperature and humidity sensors, with 56 initially installed. With the data collected and analysed, the egg farm discovered that there were glaring temperature differences which caused the lower egg laying, and subsequently resolved this and expanded the egg farm.
In these two examples, the value of an automated IoT-enabled system for egg farms speaks for itself. Whether the purpose of deploying such a system is to improve the efficiency of laying or establish a root cause for an issue, egg farmers who make use of such technologies find themselves considerably advantaged.
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