Page 6 - National Poultry Newspaper

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EGG farmer Gordon McWilliam of Kenil- worth Free Range Farm in the Mary Valley was completely overwhelmed by the scale of the recent extreme weather event and resultant flooding.
thousand chickens with- out the neighbours,” Mr McWilliam said.
The damage bill for Ke- nilworth Free Range Farm will be more than $92,000 for destroyed farm infra- structure, drowned birds and lost production.
Typically rational in an emergency, he was frozen to the spot when he walked out of his cold room on Friday February 25.
At the time of writing, Mr McWilliam estimated 1428mm of rain had fallen in the area this year, com- pared with the 174mm for the same period in 2021.
Helping coordinate re- quests to the SES and checking on neighbours, Mr McWilliam had used his tractor to help carve a track through wrecked roads to the bridge.
“They were just brilliant.”
Viewing rapidly rising floodwater around his four chicken caravans and 2000 hens, he thought, “How am I going to get the caravans out?”
Incredibly, 1041mm of that total rain fell in only five days.
Chickens were saved by loading some onto a tractor slasher.
Page 6 – National Poultry Newspaper, April 2022
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“I was trying to think,” Mr McWilliams said.
“I knew I couldn't do it on my own, and you're faced with a choice – ‘Which ones do I save, if any?’”
Neighbours Steve Waldren and Karen Mc- Namara helped him “snap out of it” when they ar- rived soon after.
Using the top of a trac- tor slasher, the front loader bucket as well as a kayak, they transported the ma- jority of drowning hens to safety and were able to save all but 200.
“We would have lost a
Gordon McWilliam’s neighbour Steve Waldren helped to save hundreds of chickens from rising floodwater.
UTS researchers develop AI monitoring system
MANY Australians are big consumers of free range eggs.
they can flock together and ‘pile-up’, which can result in hens being smothered.
and two outside the sheds.
They prefer their hens to roam free on green pastures – or at least large barns – rather than being kept in cages.
“While it is not com- mon, if a pile-up does occur, currently there are no warning systems to alert farmers that this might be occurring.”
The system has been designed to be scalable and can be increased de- pending on the area.
However, this free- dom can also result in increased dangers to hen health.
Effective controls and predictors of risk are not known, so the egg industry is looking to develop effective reduc- tion strategies.
The technology incor- porates pattern recogni- tion algorithms to count and monitor flock den- sity and behaviour.
Researchers from the University of Technol- ogy Sydney have devel- oped a world-leading artificial intelligence- based system to moni- tor the movement and behaviour of cage-free hens to improve their health and welfare, and minimise the dangers.
The UTS team in- cludes poultry and ani- mal behaviour special- ists to help analyse and interpret hen behaviour.
Professor Jian Zhang and his team from the Multimedia Data Ana- lytics Lab in the Global Big Data Technologies Centre based at UTS Tech Lab are working to develop a real-time video monitoring sys- tem, which was recently trialled on an egg farm in Windsor, NSW.
The new system alerts farm staff to any crowd- ing behaviour, as well as monitoring the hens’ access to food and wa- ter to observe changes in behaviours, and any lack of movement in individual hens, which could indicate an injury or illness.
“Poultry are very so- ciable and gregarious animals, so we need to build an ethogram – or catalogue of behaviours – which includes both individual and interac- tive behaviours to bet- ter monitor growth and welfare,” Dr Zhang said.
The project is funded by Australian Eggs – a member-owned not-for- profit organisation that invests farmer levies and public funds in research and development on be- half of the egg industry.
Australian Eggs man- aging director Rowan McMonnies said it was exciting to see a solution that could reduce labour requirements, minimise human intervention in sheds and improve ani- mal welfare.
There are also plans to build a mobile phone app that can alert su- pervisors to potential trouble.
“The farm in this pro- ject that is trialling the technology has an aver- age of 8000 hens spread across multiple sheds, andit’sdifficultforfarm staff to continuously monitor hen behaviour,” Dr Zhang said.
“This important in- vestment in AI-technol- ogy can not only lead to happier, healthier and more productive hens, but also improve farm management and reduce costs,” Mr McMonnies said.
The UTS team will run a larger trial across multiple farms in com- ing months.
“Cage-free hens have greater freedom to roam and forage, how- ever there is a risk that
The system currently being trialled uses four cameras – two inside
There is also potential to expand the technol- ogy to other areas of farming.
Additional to the devel- opment of the real-time monitoring system, Aus- tralian Eggs has funded a research project that is currently underway to understand what these risk factors are.
The next phase of the project will include a deeper analysis of be- haviours such as drink- ing, feeding, foraging and standing.
The app will include machine-learning tech- nology to improve the system with feedback from users.
Once the trials are complete, they hope to commercialisethetech- nology so that it can be implemented on a wider scale.