Agricultural Engineering in Poultry Production

I am 9 years old and have an egg business. Engineers have already helped me by providing me with feeders, waterers, and heat lamps. Poultry production has changed in half a century - now technology has even spread to the birds!! Chickens now have high-tech houses, feeders, and waterers where not too many years ago the chickens had to hope they stayed warm and that their owner came and fed and watered them.

In the 1940’s the large scale poultry market was just getting started, but when World War II came it demanded food and many people started getting into the poultry industry. The poultry market now manages at least 100,000 jobs in Georgia. In the 1940’s you would have had to build a fire in your coop to keep your chickens warm, now with the help of engineers people can control the temperature by a touch on their cell phones. Now chicken farmers can also feed their meat birds less feed in less time and still get it to market size. Now our food is not just grain we grew in our garden; we buy it from the store and it has medicines and nutrients that produce more calories and fiber. Chickens reach market size quicker because now meat birds or broilers just sit where generations before us had their chickens running around free and then the chickens would burn of the meat and fat they had on them from their meals. Also where your earlier generation may have had to wait 12 weeks for their birds to be market size we can now get our birds to market size in half that. Now on an average day Georgia produces 24.6 million pounds of poultry and 14 million eggs.

Thanks to Georgia Tech we now have data entry terminals that help with the procedures of poultry inspections. Jenelle Piempmeir, a graduate student from Georgia Tech has developed a new machine-vision technique to enhance computer screening of complex defects in poultry products. “Technology enables 3 ‘rights’ food, a basic human right; a consumer right a sustainability, which is described as environmentally right,” says Jeff Simmons, President of Elanco. Which means that we have food to eat, we know we have enough food to eat, and we are not damaging the earth while eating it. Hunger is the number 1 health problem in the world – in that 25,000 people die worldwide from starvation every day and even developed countries present cases of ‘hidden hunger’.

Now the Scientists and Engineers at Georgia Tech are working on low cost imaging robotic and sensor technologies. They are also looking for a water saving cycle that will help save water while getting the same amount of water to the poultry. In the future these high tech creations and more will be helping to achieve more in poultry science and production.

I hope to become a poultry engineer and help out with these and more ways to help out with poultry production.

Resources:

http://www.thepoultrysite.com/poultrynews/24673/ipe-2012-future-of-the-us-poultry-industry-explored

http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/history/innovations/technology-poultry-industry

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/poultry

http://gtalumni.org/Publications/magazine/win96/poultry.html

http://farmflavor.com/us-ag/georgia/animals-livestock/top-crops-georgia/modern-technology-pushe-poultry-industry-into-future

http://www.poultry.uga.edu/documents/PoultryChartsJuly2012.pdf