Our Mission
Farmers are the backbone of the poultry industry.
We want to give them better tools to get the job done.
Learning From the Best
For centuries, farmers have used their experience to learn and adapt to the needs of their animals. Their dedication to caring for animals helps to feed the world.
The amount of specialized knowledge needed to be a poultry farmer is surprisingly great. Just by hearing one of their chickens, a poultry farmer can tell if they’re healthy, happy, hungry, or sick. It may seem instinctual to some, but that level of adaptation is made possible by the supercomputer between our ears -- our brains!
We can't replicate what farmers do, but we can strive toke make their work easier in this rapidly changing world.
Poultry Farming in a Modern Age
Over the past 50 years, the average size of broiler houses has doubled to compensate for increased demand from retailers in the poultry industry. Year by year, commercial poultry farmers are expected to produce more meat to fulfill that demand, which necessitates the ability to care for more chickens.
This dramatic increase in production has made it more difficult for poultry farmers to actively monitor the welfare of their chickens. Modern poultry farms can house birds numbering in the tens of thousands -- in a setting like this, it’s hard, even for skilled farmers, to pay attention to the needs of any particular chicken.
Additionally, contract growers are often obligated to submit a detailed report on their welfare practices and outcomes to their integrators in order to keep their jobs. There’s a lot of pressure on farmers to do their absolute best to satisfy the industry and to take good care of their animals at the same time, which is a difficult balancing act to achieve.
Setting a New Welfare Standard
Currently, common welfare practices for taking care of chickens include regulating environmental factors such as temperature and tracking water and feed consumption. These types of statistics are helpful to gain some insight into how a house is functioning as a whole, they do a poor job in actively monitoring the animals. For example, when looking solely at the aggregate water consumption of a house, there isn't a way to tell whether all the birds are hydrated properly or if some are drinking too much or too little.
Recent advancements in the agricultural technology community have led to the creation of new, more powerful welfare monitoring systems for poultry farmers, which utilize machine learning to gather and organize welfare data. Camera-based solutions have been making waves in the industry: they're a step in the right direction, but cameras are expensive to implement and aren’t optimal for monitoring every type of welfare outcome.
Using Sound to Scale
Through their years of experience, farmers have learned how to listen to their animals. We've taken that methodology and applied it to a new machine learning model that can help contract growers monitor and record their welfare outcomes on a large scale.
By using audio data, the AudioT system can detect a variety of different chicken calls to predict both present and future welfare outcomes.
Our Vision
We started developing tools for the poultry industry because we want to change it for the better.
These are the effects we hope to have on the poultry industry:
- Farmers gain a powerful monitoring tool that can assist them in managing their farms and upholding industry welfare standards
- Integrators gain more thorough datasets to ensure that their chickens are properly cared for
- Consumers and retailers gain confidence that the food they buy is ethically produced
