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Dr. Jose Carlos Muñiz, Manager of Technical Consulting Jamesway Incubator Company, was in charge of the presentation on "Ensuring high productive performance for our birds" during the LPN Congress 2018.
Application of new technologies in the environmental control of poultry houses
In recent years, advances in poultry farming have been very important in both the genetic and technological areas.
This part of the new technologies is what we are going to focus on, seeing how to apply these advances in the poultry industry.
The sensors have gained precision and reliability, having probes for temperature, relative humidity, CO2, NH3, static pressure, airspeed, lux meters, and PH meters.
We can incorporate this technology into the new regulators to, in this way, ensure that the advisable limits of humidity and harmful gases such as CO2 and NH3 will not be exceeded.
The programmed minimum ventilation needs lose importance as all these sensors influence them.
We can install temperature and humidity probes inside and outside the building to calculate at any time what ventilation is needed to eliminate the water vapor produced by the animals.
Production control sensors
- Silo weighing system
- Bird weighing system
- Water meters
- Electricity consumption meters
- Gas meters
- Water level sensors in drinker lines
- Video-cameras
- Alarm systems
All these sensors open up a new world for us, generating information that can help us manage production in a poultry house.
Weighing systems give us conversion rates in real-time.
Water meters allow us to detect sanitary problems very quickly and even manage and manage the ventilation of the warehouse.
In addition, a huge source of information is generated to manage alarms and specific problems that are generated so much on a farm.
The weighing of the silos and the weighing of the birds help us to manage the feed factories and the transports. And the weighing of the birds is essential for decision-making in the slaughterhouse.
Current poultry houses and the application of new technologies
All this information generated by all the sensors and the increase in the price of fuels for the heating system has led to the development and cheaper insulation and its availability. Together with the generic advances in birds, it has led us to need poultry houses that stop depending on external weather conditions. It has gone from open houses to closed houses with solid walls, well insulated on the walls and ceiling.
Being closed poultry houses, we can better manage lighting, ventilation, heating…
At this point, it is essential to highlight the need to close or improve the old warehouses not to lose the productive or economic improvements the new designs allow us.
Although you always have to see if it is better to reform or make new ships. At this point, the size of the buildings is essential. So every day, larger buildings are built in width and length to lower the cost of building per housed chicken.
One of the important changes that are taking place in Europe is the use of heat exchangers to take advantage of the heat from minimum ventilation. They make a lot of sense in cold areas, where the energy cost is high.
The alarm system is of vital importance. Since they are more automated sheds, it is necessary to have an alarm system that avoids all kinds of problems, and the alarms must be more complete.
Communication systems and the cloud
The information generated by the new controllers of the houses with all that amount of sensors is only one of the legs of the production.
Production companies are interested in managing all the industries involved in production and the union of these with marketing.
The incubator, the feed plant, the slaughterhouse, and the management of the different types of transport to be able to serve an increasingly demanding market.
We focus on managing the part involved in the production and providing information so that all industries can be managed.
But today, the ventilation controllers are in charge of measuring and passing on the information the sensors measure. We also try to use this information to manage environmental parameters better. And generate the productive parameters within our reach to the rest of the industries to facilitate their work.
In addition, we greatly facilitate the work of farmers and field visitors or managers with communications via the Internet and cell phones.
When the visitors arrive at the farm, they see how it is, the data records of all the breedings to see what has happened, and thus they can make decisions more quickly. In addition, they can manage their work by having access to all the information without having to travel or decide where it is better to go before or after.
The new technologies are and will quickly change the way of producing, gaining in efficiency and, above all allowing decisions to be made more objectively by having more data to consider.