Mark Clements: Hello and welcome to WATT Poultry Chat. My name is Mark Clements, I'm Editor in Chief, Poultry, with WATT Global Media and today's Poultry Chat is brought to you by TARGAN.
TARGAN is an innovative animal ag tech systems company focused on transforming animal protein production industries worldwide. Founded in 2015, and based in Raleigh, North Carolina, the company's mission is to provide affordable, individualized technologies that will improve speed, accuracy and animal welfare.
Their flagship product is WingScan, a feather sex identification system using AI-powered advanced vision systems.
Today we're joined by Liz Turpin, VP at TARGAN, to talk about how TARGAN's feather sexing technology can address the challenges in the broiler production industry. Liz, welcome. Thank you ever so much for joining us today.
Liz Turpin: Thank you. I'm excited to be here and speaking with you today.
Mark Clements: Feather sexing has been gaining interest within the poultry industry. What are your views on this trend, and which are the factors that you think are driving its adoption?
Liz Turpin: So we're very excited to see the adoption of automated feather sexing, and this is facilitated by new technologies being available to the industry. I think this trend is going to continue as WingScan is more available across the world, it overcomes a lot of the limitations of manual feather sexing.
Producers recognize the value that feather sexing brings to enhance efficiencies across the production process. A lot of this comes from automation. So what does automation bring to the industry? It's increased accuracy, increased speed, enhanced animal welfare, faster delivery time from the birds to the farm and overall, feather sexing essentially allows producers to optimize uniformity and will be a game changer for the broiler industry going forward.
Mark Clements: You mentioned animal welfare. That's a critical concern for the industry. How do AI-powered solutions help producers meet welfare standards while still maintaining operational efficiency?
Liz Turpin: I agree, animal welfare is a really important factor for us as well. We're trying to design machines and improve animal welfare.
But when you look at artificial intelligence or machine learning and how it links together, AI in general is transforming the poultry industry and will continue over time, and it's having this impact around the world in different industries.
It allows us to take manual processes and automate them, resulting in smarter, more data driven decisions that, again, enhance productivity.
So, we use AI and machine learning in general to help us speed up processing. This allows us to help producers get the birds to the farms faster. It decreases the amount of manual handling that these individual birds go through, allowing for improved welfare there, so we don't have injuries from being over handled. And these technology advances combined with our system, which is ultimately designed to minimize drop heights using things like slides, angle conveyors and shorter distance between conveyors, this all enhances the animal welfare and allows the producers to get healthier birds to the farm.
Mark Clements: So, in terms of hatcheries and producers, what would be the economic advantages for them of implementing feather sexing, in terms of feed conversion or flock uniformity or even processing yields?
Liz Turpin: We see this broken down into two different groups. So one group is the people who are not currently feather sexing their birds. They have the chance to see, probably, the biggest improvements all across their production processes. It starts with, as you mentioned, improved FCR. This is a big point for the poultry producers. Allowing you to grow the males and females separately, allows you to optimize your harvest time and improve your FCR for both sexes, and harvest the birds at the optimal time for them.
You have the ability to change your feed and optimize that for the growth of the birds, and you'll hear me say, optimize a lot. That's really what feather sexing allows you to do, optimize for the sex, so stocking densities is another place you're allowed to optimize. And this allows you overall, to achieve reliable weights and sizes in your birds.
This increased uniformity at the farm and ultimately on the birds delivered to the processing plant, increases efficiencies at the plant, results in less damage carcasses, improved yields, product quality and allows for improved manual and automatic deboning and other processing at the plant.
When you're looking at the other group, these are people who are currently manually feather sexing their birds. The advantages of an automatic system like WingScan is increased accuracy, speed and reliability.
Mark Clements: Now Liz TARGAN's vaccine delivery system has generated a lot of interest in the industry. Could you give us an update on that, its progress and explain how it complements technologies such as WingScan to optimize poultry health and productivity?
Liz Turpin: The vaccination delivery system is one that's really close to my heart.
I have a background in vaccine development, so I really see the potential for this product to make a huge impact in the industry.
So what we're going to deliver to the hatchery is greater accuracy in your vaccine delivery, increased consistency, and this all happens by targeting individual birds. So we're not spraying over the top of the bird and hoping they preen well, we're actually targeting the individual bird, and this results in a more uniform vaccine take. The result is direct vaccination of individual birds, improved performance and welfare on the farm.
Our product development has focused on, I guess overall, developing a more sophisticated device. So two pieces that I can talk about more openly is recirculation. So vaccine quality can be impacted by keeping the vaccine in suspension the entire time before it's delivered to the bird, and this results in a uniform dose to each bird. So again, our focus on optimal recirculation improves what we deliver to the bird, or makes it work optimally and then precise administration by detecting individual birds delivering a dose to each individual bird, we optimize vaccine take.
So in 2024 we've done a lot of rework on our vaccination delivery system. We have done a lot of testing in house, and we've made great advances and strides. So we're really excited to go into the new year. So by early 2025 we will be moving this device into a hatchery, testing larger scale numbers of birds, and then ultimately starting field trials and this will lead to commercialization by the end of the year. Overall, with the vaccination delivery system and the WingScan system, they work together to improve welfare and give and deliver better quality birds to the farm to ultimately help producers.
Mark Clements: Liz, thank you ever so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Now, TARGAN will be at IPPE in Atlanta, showcasing its WingScan technology, which has processed over 500 million birds to date. Visit booth B10045, in Hall B, or go to, targan.com to learn more. Audience, thank you for joining us. Goodbye.
