Team develops automatic weighing method for broiler chickens
Marie Donlon | November 06, 2023In a bid to ease a piece of the commercial broiler production process — namely measuring the body weight of chickens, which reveals the health and production efficiency of the flock — a team of researchers from Zhejiang University in China has developed a real-time, accurate weight-monitoring system.
Featuring a weighing platform and communication terminal, and based on the perching behavior of chickens, the new weighing system incorporates data acquisition, transmission, analysis and display in conjunction with Zhejiang University-developed PORWI data analysis for the intelligent perception of the average weight of the broiler flock.
The installation of weighing platform (a) and communication terminal (b) in real applications. Source: Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (2023). DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2023510
The team has already tested the weighing system under actual production conditions, achieving a reported average accuracy rate of 99.5%.
According to its developers, the system is appropriate for daily weight monitoring in cage-free broiler houses and is expected to improve feeding management, growth monitoring and finishing day predictions. Further, it reportedly outperforms manual weighing processes, which tend to be stressful on the flock, time-consuming and labor-intensive.
An article detailing the weighing system, “Development of an Automatic Weighing Platform for Monitoring Bodyweight of Broiler Chickens in Commercial Production,” appears in the journal Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering.