Data driving up performance in broiler production

Peter was on the farmer panel at REAP 2022. Ahead of the conference we asked him more about the operation at Uphouse Farm.

“We are an 840,000-bird site spread across two farms, both running the higher welfare, in-house hatching ‘Nestborn’ system. We have two great teams of stockmen who are all dedicated to achieving the highest welfare and performance from our birds. The technology we have installed in the sheds gives them a great platform on which to achieve this, and allows us to collect daily performance data and analyse it. If there is a drop in performance, we analyse the information to try and understand the cause.

“For each shed there is an interface that provides a summary of key information, such as numbers of birds remaining in the shed, how much they are eating and drinking, humidity, temperature, lighting pattern and much more. This data then entered each day into a spreadsheet and compared against target performance.

“Attention to detail is crucial for us; if you think about even one drinker line or pan line at the wrong height, this can impact the performance of thousands of birds in each shed. If you then multiply this up over seven and a half flocks per year, across two farms, that will have a significant impact on bird performance.

“The farm also has a 2.2MWh biomass plant, burning our own chicken manure, producing sustainable heat for our own sheds via process called Fluidised Bed Combustion. This produces a drier heat, which reduces the levels of CO, CO₂ and ammonia compared to using LPG, consequently creating a much healthier environment for the birds. As well as using around half of our manure produced annually to heat the sheds, a lot goes into our arable operation, which makes the farm cyclical in nature – which is great from a sustainability point of view.

Challenges

“Broiler farming is a high-input high-output business. Soaring input costs and ever-increasing pressure for environmental sustainability are two huge talking points in our industry. Feed is our largest input, making up around 70% of the cost of each flock, simultaneously being responsible for around 80% of greenhouse gas emissions in the poultry sector. That makes our FCRs one the biggest driver of both economic and environmental sustainability.

“The continued adoption of emerging technologies combined with continued analysis of big data will have a huge part to play here, as they will help deliver new efficiencies and continuous improvement around this key metric.”

“Beyond feed, one of the biggest inputs is electricity, and these costs have gone up 165% in the last eight months, which has been a real kicker. For context, across the farm in the height of summer, we have 384 fans that need powering to ensure our birds have an optimal environment in the sheds. We do have 600 KWh of ground and roof mounted solar, but that doesn’t get close to covering our parasitic load.

“We are always looking for new technologies to improve our energy efficiencies, and have commissioned an energy audit to help us do that. I would love to ideally take the farm off-grid, making us self-sustainable, but the only way I can see this happening at present would be to invest in an AD (anaerobic digestion) plant or install battery storage technology when that becomes available.

“Even with ever improving technology, the main issue is large-scale energy generation is an enterprise in itself. The farm already has a full-time heating and farm engineer managing the three biomass boilers, and an AD plant would take significant input of time. However, with the ever-increasing cost of electricity, this is something the business has to consider.

Summary

“I am excited about the potential of data-led and data-driven decision making for the poultry industry and think we can do more in terms of using the data available. Collaboration is key to achieve higher efficiency in our sector and I believe we have a lot to learn from each other.

“At the end of the day, I am a farmer, not a data analyst. We have access to a huge amount of data, and I would like to be able to analyse this in more depth to understand better what we need to change and then see that applied in practice.”