DEVELOPMENT OF AN AUTOMATIC WEIGHING PLATFORM FOR MONITORING BODYWEIGHT OF BROILER CHICKENS IN COMMERCIAL PRODUCTION

Highlights

● An automatic weighing system for monitoring bodyweight of broilers was developed.

● The new system was compared to the established live-bird sales weighing system data and tested in various conditions.

● The system demonstrated superior accuracy and stability for commercial houses.

Abstract

Bodyweight is a key indicator of broiler production as it measures the production efficiency and indicates the health of a flock. Currently, broiler weight (i.e., bodyweight) is primarily weighed manually, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and tends to create stress in birds. This study aimed to develop an automatic and stress-free weighing platform for monitoring the weight of floor-reared broiler chickens in commercial production. The developed system consists of a weighing platform, a real-time communication terminal, computer software and a smart phone applet user-interface. The system collected weight data of chickens on the weighing platform at intervals of 6 s, followed by filtering of outliers and repeating readings. The performance and stability of this system was systematically evaluated under commercial production conditions. With the adoption of data preprocessing protocol, the average error of the new automatic weighing system was only 10.3 g, with an average accuracy 99.5% with the standard deviation of 2.3%. Further regression analysis showed a strong agreement between estimated weight and the standard weight obtained by the established live-bird sales system. The variance (an indicator of flock uniformity) of broiler weight estimated using automatic weighing platforms was in accordance with the standard weight. The weighing system demonstrated superior stability for different growth stages, rearing seasons, growth rate types (medium- and slow-growing chickens) and sexes. The system is applicable for daily weight monitoring in floor-reared broiler houses to improve feeding management, growth monitoring and finishing day prediction. Its application in commercial farms would improve the sustainability of poultry industry.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

automatic weighing / weight monitoring / floor housing / uniformity / precision poultry farming

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by Zhejiang Provincial Key R&D Program (2021C02026) and China Agriculture Research System (CARS-40).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Danni Zhou, Yi Zhou, Pengguang He, Lin Yu, Jinming Pan, Lilong Chai, and Hongjian Lin declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. All applicable institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2023. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)