Smart Poultry Farming using IOT

Abstract

With increasing population the demand for food is increasing day by day. Poultry meat is considered as one of the best sources of protein worldwide. However, poultry farmers of developing countries like Pakistan are facing multiple challenges to meet the demand and keeping their business profitable due to multiple factors, including environmental ones which affect farm’s production by affecting birds’ growth and survival rate. The temperature and humidity inside a farm play a very important role in the growth of birds during various phases of their life. Similarly, harmful gasses like Ammonia (NH3) and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) can severely affect birds’ weight gain, even cause their death. Small to medium sized farmers in developing countries are unaware of these harmful factors present in environment. They use manual methods to maintain the environment of their farms. Manual methods of dealing with such factors are difficult and inefficient. This study provided details on how farmers can achieve maximum out of available resources by implementing low-cost IoT technologies to maximize their production. We can automate the controlling of environmental factors using IoT to keep these favorable to the growth of flock. This thesis also provides design and development details on how IoT can provide better situation awareness. The presented solution also provides various data analytics features to help farmer taking right decisions for their future flocks. We provide tools for descriptive analysis of the collected data to keep the farmer well informed. It also provides prescriptive analysis to help farmers in decision making. Finally the system has been verified and validated using experimentation, implementation at poultry farm and results of surveys. The proposed system can help farmers in achieving situation awareness, better control on the environmental factors and analytical data that can help in decision making. This data can later be used for predictive analysis about flock behavior and performance. The cost of proposed system has been kept very low, to make it feasible for small to medium sized farm owners.