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The Purdue University College of Agriculture has a long history
of impacting research, education and cooperative extension
to improve agriculture and the role of agriculture in our society.
One of the ways that we continue to do that is in this
realm of digital agriculture, it's the fusing of our physical and
social worlds to make improved data driven decisions and actions.
So you'll see a website up there in the corner, we encourage you to visit that,
purdue.ag/digag.
I am Dennis Buckmaster, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering.
And I also serve our dean and our associate deans as a dean's fellow for
digital agriculture to coordinate activities in the college,
at the university and to external stakeholders regarding data
driven technology intensive agriculture.
One of the projects that we have is the Wabash Heartland Innovation Network.
The WHIN project is not exclusively a Purdue project.
It is a partnership with WHIN, the organization,
the community foundations in a ten county region of West Central Indiana.
Of course, Purdue as well as Ivy Tech Community College and
many partner organizations, farms, manufacturing firms, etc.
The focus of the WHIN project is to increase the role of
advanced technology in agriculture and manufacturing.
In this series of brief presentations, you're going to learn
how the WHIN funds are being used to advance the technology in agriculture.
So whether this particular video covers the capturing, the clustering,
the collecting, or the computing, you will have to wait to see.
But in each of these cases, we are moving forward
the technology in agriculture through digital means.
>> Good day to you all,
this is a WHIN status update on the Internet connectivity and
Internet of Things project for a livestock facility.
The principal investigator for this is Dr.
Bob Stwalley of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.
Co PIs are Dr. Dennis Buckmaster, also of Ag and Biological Engineering.
Dr. James Krogmeier of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dr.
Allan Schinckel of Animal Sciences.
Some background on this is that we
are looking to add a precision livestock
instrumentation suite to fair WHIN barn at nsec,
the Purdue Ag Center for livestock.
With that you have decisions to make about whether or
not you're talking about a real time setup or a batch setup.
Whether you're looking at open range or confinement animal systems, and
whether you're interested in operational or physiological data on the animals.
The objective for this specific program is to work with the Farrowing Barn for swine.
We're talking about an integration with the Purdue cooling pad.
And we're talking about both operational and physiological sensors and
we will have real time connection using wireless connectivity to
a server within the building hooked to the Internet.
In terms of technology development,
we'll be coupling existing sensors which do both humidity and temperature.
We're interested in audio and video data.
We'll be taking information from the cooling pad suite,
skin temperature of the animal and thermal photography.
In term of what we have under development, we're interested
in a real time feed scale for what the animal's eating as well as
real time water use, potentially using a turbine flow meter.
Other developments that we have going on, we're looking at
a real time longitudinal scale for the animal with load cells.
We actually believe we have the potential to tell with a sophisticated
enough scale whether or not the animal is laying down or standing.
And we're also talking about a longitudinal vaginal temperature probe for
the sows.
Current technology only allows about two to three days worth of data.
And we're looking at developing something that will work for
a much longer period of time.
The experimental program we have with WHIN is actually
directly supporting a graduate student Tyler Field.
The primary objective for this program is to create centralized data connectivity.
And we hope to use this connectivity in the Farrowing Barns with other
technology we have such as the Indirect Calorimeters, the Purdue Hog Cooling Pads,
different Operational Metric Calculations that we'll be performing
in real time along with physiological health measurements.
The experimental program itself should be a roadmap for the inclusion
of precision livestock instrumentation inside at least confinement facilities.
One of the real difficulties associated with confinement facilities
is the operating conditions inside these buildings are incredibly harsh and
very limiting to electronics.
We've got some experience overcoming this and
we hope to continue pushing forward on that frontier and
we're intending to support ongoing heat production, heat stress and
genetics research in swine with our experimental program.
In terms of anticipated results from this, we absolutely want to
demonstrate an Internet of Things coupling inside of a Farrowing Barn.
We also want to demonstrate an additional- the robustness
of at least our ability to seal these sensors inside that.
And again looking to add to the heat production database and
operational database for the calorimeters and
the Hog Cooling Pad along with work on the Swine Genetics Database
under production at Purdue at the moment.
If you have any questions,
please feel free to contact the principal investigator.
I can be reached at rms3@purdue.edu.
Thank you this afternoon for your time.
>> Bob, thank you very much for
that overview of what you're doing there with some very good collaborators.
I guess my first question would be,
you mentioned somewhere along the way some operational metrics and calculations.
What are you thinking of there in terms of the operational metrics?
>> They're interested in the animals, their heat consumption.
And the closer to real time we can get with that heat consumption,
the more they'll be able to use that information.
I mean, certainly at the moment, they'll come reasonably close
over a 24 hour period if you're feeding them a certain amount.
At the end of the day, they consumed it all.
But we would really like to know where during the day they're
consuming that food and how much are they taking in at any one period.
So, feed consumption is one of those things.
One of the things that our animal science people are very excited
about knowing is actually the animal's water consumption.
There's no real extensive published data on that.
So we're gonna work on basically getting a smaller turbine
flow meter associated with their waterers.
We will also have video, so
if it happens to be an animal that likes to play with that water,
we'll be able to make an analytical adjustment to that number afterwards.
But at least, we'll have numbers on what individual water
consumption is going into a particular crate.
And then obviously we're also interested in knowing about
the animals' weight all the time.
So, we are in the process of actually putting a set of load
cells underneath some of the cooling pads so
that again it won't be accurate from just moment to moment but
spread over the course of several minutes or even several hours.
We should be able to get the animals' weight after that, so.
>> Do you have any commercial centers in play?
Or are most all of these prototypes or
developments out of your lab, or collaborators' labs?
>> I very strongly encourage my team not to reinvent the wheel.
We will be looking, again, as much as possible, to use existing sensors.
Now, as we move to more physiological data,
there we're going to have to actually kind of start from scratch and
build from a component wise assembly to get something.
You'll notice that in the slides one of the things
that we actually have OTC looking at our proprietary disclosure on,
it is a long term vaginal temperature implant for the sows.
And whereas we'll purchase certain electronic components,
the actual assembly of that, that will be on the Purdue [INAUDIBLE].
>> New novel devices.
Great, you mentioned in your presentation and
I fully get it because I've also been in these environments, just the nasty
environment in some livestock facilities for electronics and their connectors, etc.
Will your sensors be a mix of wired and wireless?
Or you'll be using Bluetooth Low Energy or WiFi?
How will the data flow in your instance?
>> Well I think you're absolutely right, I think we will actually probably
use a combination of both wired and wireless transmission paths.
We need a small microprocessor in place to do certain
control functions on some of the equipment that we have and
that micro processor of course has a lot of extra
computational capabilities associated with it.
So, our thinking at least at the moment will be to kind of
use that microprocessor as a centralized collection point per crate and
then have it wirelessly broadcast to a local
server within the building or within servicing.
>> My last question might require speculation, I don't know.
But I was thinking about as you're talking about the feed intake and
the water intake and the other measurements.
Are there any data that you think you'll be generating, that would be useful for
what I call within-the-day decisions that the farmer or
the site manager might be making?
So rather than the strategic season long, cycle long decisions,
but with any of this data, how- >> Be tactical.
>> The tactical, the day by day, minute by minute within the hour,
those sorts of things?
>> Absolutely, we certainly think so, particularly on feed consumption.
If we have an animal that is absolutely not eating,
clearly there's something not right there.
It would be the same thing if an animal attempts to gorge yourself
all at once on a day's feed, that's a bit abnormal as well.
So, feed tip off would certainly be left.
The scale that we told you that we're attempting to put together
with the cooling pads.
We actually believe that with multiple load cells,
we should be able to get a coordinated signal which would allow us to
know whether the animal is laying down or standing up.
And certainly our animal welfare people have certain
guidelines and so we should be able to eventually get
a program that would look at that data and let us know A,
if an animal is just never getting off, that of course is no good.
Or if an animal is spending an excessive amount of time on all four legs.
We know that that is also an indication that she's not feeling well.
>> Well again, thanks for the report.
Thanks for some good answers to these questions.
Really excited about the prospects for digital livestock.
>> Well, we are too Dennis, we really believe that this is- my
team thinks this is a pretty open frontier, and
we're very excited about the possibilities in front of us here.