An IoT Smart Broiler Farming Model for Low Income Farmers

Abstract

The coming of Internet of things (IoT) brings opportunities for the deploying of wireless sensor networks. One area of deployment is smart poultry farming to improve the quality and security of chicken varieties that include broilers. The quality of broilers produced is dependent on the environment in which the broilers are kept. In addition, the revenue of the farmer is guaranteed if theft of stock is prevented. The current methods farmers use are labour intensive and time consuming as they are manual. Leveraging the features of IoT and sensors can help to monitor the environment and ensure adverse conditions are reported for farmers to take action before they harm the livestock. Incorporating intruder detection when monitoring conditions in the environment can also prevent stock theft and that can increase the income obtained by farmers. For such a system to be widely adopted by low income farmers, the cost should be low compared commercially available climate control systems that are meant for commercial farmers. The system should also provide ease of use for less technically skilled farmers, reduce the time taken by farmers to take action in controlling theft and conditions in the environment and be accessible from any location other than the broiler house. In this paper, we propose a low-cost model that can be used to monitor conditions in the environment of a broiler house and send the values to the farmer in real-time. The proposed model is based on open source microcontrollers, ZigBee protocol, GSM network, mobile applications and cloud computing.