Using water usage modeling to generate alarm events related to poultry management

Daily water consumption has been used as a management tool by poultry producers for decades. Since water consumption is closely correlated to feed consumption, decreases in daily water consumption are often an indicator of reduced feed consumption and/or health issue. With the emergence of ultrasonic water meters bird water usage can now be more accurately monitored on a minute-to-minute basis thus providing the opportunity to view bird drinking/feeding activity over the course of the day graphically. Ultrasonic water meters were installed on two Free Range Layer Houses in Northeast Georgia and water usage was measured every 5 minutes for four weeks. The data were collected through a data acquisition system and analyzed. From these data a daily water usage profile was established and shown to be highly repeatable. Preliminary data was analyzed graphically through Microsoft Excel. A 4th degree polynomial regression (R-squared = 0.93) was created to best match the daily water usage profile. The standard deviation was low showing that the data was very consistent. The Standard deviation ranged from .02 gallons to one gallon. This data was used to create a software program to model usage, flag uncommon usage, and generate an alert. Using known events that occurred during the 27-day collection period, the model was tuned to detect abnormally high or low flow rates during specific times of the day. Standard deviation of data from each sampling interval was calculated and used to set the upper and lower control limits through the day. Many bird and house related management issues are missed unless the grower is constantly monitoring the data, which most do not have the time to do properly. It is hoped that after further testing this tool will provide a tool to the industry that will alert producers if there are deviations from the expected water usage profile.

Key Words: Water Consumption, Management, Precision Ag, Modeling.