IoT for Smart Agriculture

Poultry Sense

Monitoring and assessing key welfare indicators such as weight, water consumption, temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels within poultry houses is essential for ensuring sustainable and productive poultry farming practices. However, assessing these indicators in large poultry farms that rear millions of birds each year is no easy undertaking.

A customer managing 700,000 birds across 7 farms required a solution to wirelessly monitor parameters including climate, water consumption, and bird weights. Prior to implementing the PrognositX - Poultry Sense IoT solution, this customer manually took readings of temperature and humidity conditions and input those values into a spreadsheet. This proved to be a lengthy and increasingly inefficient process. Conditions in every shed and farm can vary, and with increasingly stringent audit requirements, the customer required a solution that would enable them to efficiently and consistently capture, track, and interpret real-time data.

Poultry Sense solution provided reliable hardware for capturing accurate, live insights to improve bird performance and welfare. These solutions included sense nodes for temperature and humidity, water consumption sensors, and wireless weighing platforms. The Poultry Sense IoT solution combines a wealth of expertise and evidence with the knowledge of specialist vets, engineers, and data analysts to bring together real-time data across both environmental and health parameters to help facilitate improvements in bird performance, economics, and welfare. The wireless system feeds accurate, live data into a bespoke analytics platform that uses artificial intelligence to produce insights assisting in better-informed on-farm and supply chain decision making.

PrognostiX utilizes TEKTELIC’s KONA Macro and Micro Gateways to provide the LoRaWAN® connectivity needed for their innovative Poultry Sense solution. LoRaWAN® is the ideal technology to provide cost-effective, scalable, long-range, low power, and secure bi-directional communication between devices and gateways. These gateways are ideal for transmitting real-time sensor data securely over long distances. The KONA Macro IoT Gateway is designed to be compact and lightweight and is targeted at outdoor installations which require a small form factor and low power consumption. To minimize cost and installation complexity, the gateway is designed with internal antennas for the 3G/4G modem and for the GPS receiver. The KONA Micro IoT Gateway was built for applications that require Always On connectivity for their IoT solutions and is configured with an internal 3G/4G modem and a built-in four-hour battery backup.