Companies find ways to collect livestock data for producers from multiple sensors that already exist in livestock barns
More sensors continue to be added to livestock barns to help increase animal productivity, reduce labour and provide safer environments for people and animals.
Dairy farms, especially, have moved to embrace sensors over the past five to 10 years and now have more data available, similar to their hog and poultry farming neighbours.
“On the dairy side, in the past 10 years and especially the last five have really ramped up on the dairy side,” says Grant Mackay, owner of Mackay Equipment Sales in Saskatoon and Lethbridge. “The pig industry has followed that as well, with electronic sow feeding.”
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Companies are working to connect the back of the barn — the area where the animals live and the systems that manage them are located — to the front of the barn, where processing happens, such as milking and egg sorting.
Unlike in crops, where companies are in a mad dash to integrate data with other companies, the livestock sector harvests data directly from individual sensor controllers. The data is owned by the farmer, without needing company approval to gather it.
Creating smart barns for livestock that bring all the data together to improve decision making is the idea behind Cortex Agritechnology, a Winnipeg company.
“People don’t understand necessarily what they should do with their data,” says Jennifer Hildebrand, director of business development for Cortex. “We want to tell them. You can do preventive maintenance. You can monitor and control all sorts of things from your smart devices.”
The company was founded in 2022 by mode40, an established technology solutions provider for the agrifood supply chain, and AgriHub, the parent company for several prominent builders and technology suppliers to livestock farmers, mostly in Western Canada.
AgriHub was formed in 2020, creating a parent company for Penner Farm Services, Western Ag Systems, United Agri Systems and Horizon Livestock & Poultry Supply.
Cortex has a dashboard and monitoring device called DataPro that allows for the control of all barn systems in one place and the integration of data from those systems.
Hildebrand says they are putting sensors on equipment that hasn’t had them before, using the example of a manure scraping system that now can alert a farmer if it stops working before there’s a pile-up of manure and machinery in the barn.
Cortext also has FeedPlannr, a feed system management program, and an electrical fault detection product.
“If your animal isn’t eating as much in January, why? The data will tell you,” says Hildebrand. “Charting and being able to see the history and the trends of the data is what will show you where you have some shortfalls, or my animal did really well, why?”
Hildebrand was talking about the Cortex products at the recent Ag In Motion show near Saskatoon, where other livestock providers also had data solutions for farmers.
MJ Sharma of Lethbridge Dairy Mart says barn data continues to change.
“Especially in the past few years, with all the automation and sensors and technology, they have been coming more and more. They definitely help in the efficiency and the management side,” he says.
He used the example of tank washing on dairy farms, where it used to be a manual process to switch the system on and off and manage the washing process. Now, with sensors in place, especially with a robotic milking system, it can save time and water.
Similarly, manure equipment and ventilation systems now are controllable by automation and Sharma says that’s where efficiency in electricity use and increased longevity of equipment can show up.
Sharma said the integration of controls from the front and back of the barn has enabled more understanding of how one affects the other. The effectiveness of ventilation can be better measured when it can be easily compared with milking data trends.
Lethbridge Dairy Mart put together its own control system that can run the whole barn and integrate livestock well-being and milking data.
He says the next step in barn data will be about continuing to manage cow comfort and integrating external factors from outside the barn, such as weather systems, instead of just monitoring internal air quality.
The poultry industry is the furthest ahead in integrating data from barns and using that data to make precise management decisions. At Mackay Equipment Sales Ltd., they have been working with poultry farmers from their locations in Saskatoon, Lethbridge and a business in Iowa. They also work with hog and dairy farmers.
Grant Mackay was at Ag In Motion and says they’ve worked with Skov, the Danish company, for 40 years, and have watched the company evolve.
“They offer something that is the brains behind the climate and production, so feeding and watering and animal weighing,” he says.
It’s hooked up to a touch-screen controller that manages all the devices, plus sensors for carbon dioxide, ammonia and humidity.
“You can take all of that information and calculate FCR, feed conversion ratios, peak efficiency factor and it’s all collected and put on a PC so it takes that information and displays it in a graphical way.”
The data is extensive, including water per bird per day, and feed per bird per day. That data then creates ratios for management decisions and monitoring.
“All that raw data is calculated and deciphered for you,” he says. “That happens on a daily basis or weekly that you think the solution is X and it ends up being something completely different because you didn’t have the data before. You can get birds or pigs to market a heck of a lot quicker.”
