Robots march into poultry production

From bird health and welfare to building hygiene and processing, robots are showing their potential to participate in poultry production by carrying out a wide range of tasks that were previously carried out by farm or plant personnel.

(Paul Fleet | bigstockphoto.com)
(Paul Fleet | bigstockphoto.com)

From bird health and welfare to building hygiene and processing, robots are showing their potential to participate in poultry production by carrying out a wide range of tasks that were previously carried out by farm or plant personnel.

In France, the firm Mesures Contrôles Automatiques Industriels (MCAI) is working on the development and manufacture of a number of units to be used for the cleaning and disinfection of poultry houses, reported La France Agricole recently.

Through its division, Octopus Robotics, it expects 50 robots to be ready by the end of this year. Financing is currently being sought from investors in France and across Europe, and the company expects sales to Brazil, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Canada to follow shortly after its home market.

Offering a range of five robots, the company’s machines are mobile, autonomous and intelligent, and they can be controlled remotely. Among the tasks they can carry out are the treatment and disinfection of poultry litter by releasing a dry biocidal mist. They can also carry out routine monitoring of temperature, humidity, and light levels across the house.

MCAI is not the only company in France developing robots.

Tibot won a three-star innovation award at the SPACE 2016 trade show for its latest robot.

The firm’s TiOne is designed to move egg-laying or breeder hens off the litter and into nest boxes to lay their eggs, thus saving staff time and effort in picking up those mislaid on the floor. As well as monitoring the conditions in the poultry house, the machine can also be programmed to break up any crust on the litter, which improves the birds’ health and welfare by reducing potential pathogens and the risks of breast blisters and hock burns.

'Nanny robots' care for Chinese chickens

At its layer complex near China’s capital, Beijing, Thailand-based Charoen Pokphand Group (CP Group) is also using robots - to monitor the health of the hens, according to a report from Bloomberg earlier this year.

A total of 18 of these machines patrol the poultry houses and their three million birds for up to 12 hours a day, monitoring the birds’ body temperatures and movements, and identifying any sick or dead birds for the human workers to remove from the cages for appropriate treatment.

Following a number of well-publicized food safety issues in the country in recent years, Chinese consumers now put a high priority on high-quality and wholesome foods.

“We want to control the whole chain from the farm to the table,” said Xie Yi, a senior vice chairman of CP Group’s China agribusiness unit. “Problems sometimes involve human error, so full automation enhances the safety level.”

Robotics in poultry processing

In 2015, robots were not being adopted by the U.S. poultry processing industry as fast as in Europe, or other industrial sectors. The main reason given by processors for their reluctance to adopt this type of technology was that, at typically one-and-a-half to two years, payback was not rapid enough.

“Robotics solutions for the poultry processing industry are not necessarily easy but they are doable,” according to Rick Bennett of KL Products, a firm that was acquired by Zoetis, Inc. in that year.

In Bennett’s view, the top three tasks in poultry processing that would most benefit from robotics are the hanging of live poultry in shackles on slaughter lines, the rehanging of poultry carcasses on processing lines, and the mounting of chicken front halves on cones for deboning on further-processing lines.

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