Summertime living has never been easy for chickens in
Georgia.
Heat stress takes a
heavy toll every year. But a few “talking” chickens in
a University of Georgia
lab may soon change that.

Modern poultry houses’ vastly improved cooling methods have
already helped make Georgia
farmers the nation’s No. 1 poultry producers. But the houses’
climate controls can still
be greatly improved.

That’s where Takoi Hamrita’s sophisticated chickens come
in.

Let the Chickens
Talk

“The chickens are the most important things in the
house,” said Hamrita, an
assistant professor of biological and
agricultural engineering with the UGA College of
Agricultural
and Environmental
Sciences. “We’re using the approach of letting the birds
tell us whether they’re
comfortable.”

With the chickens, in effect, helping control their climate
themselves, they can be
comfortable all the time. That may not seem important. But the
benefits are clear. With an
always-ideal climate, chickens will:

• Be better able to ward off disease pathogens they might
  otherwise carry in their bodies
  to your table.
• Survive better, saving farmers the expense and trouble of
  disposing of birds otherwise
  killed by heat stress — while keeping the environment
  safer.
• Grow with peak efficiency, improving the growers’
  profits.

Sensors and Artificial
Intelligence

To get her chickens to “talk,” Hamrita uses an
ingenious combination of
sensors and artificial
intelligence .

She starts with quarter-inch-thick sensors the diameter of a
nickel. Painlessly implanted (with an anesthetic) under the
breast bone of three-week-old chickens, the sensors transmit data
to a central computer.

“At the moment, the sensors tell us only the birds’
deep-body temperature,”
Hamrita said. “Eventually, though, they will also tell us
their respiration and heart
rate.”

With the physiological feedback, the computer takes over the
controls in a way the
farmer never could. “It determines, using artificial
intelligence, how the bird is
feeling,” she said. “And it decides what the computer’s
next move should
be.”

A Complex
System

The system is complex. It has to be. “The bird is
dynamic. It’s growing every day,
so its response to its environment changes every day,”
Hamrita said. “The
environment is constantly changing, too. We can no longer rely
on
standard mathematic
models to handle all these variables.”

The computer’s neural networks, though, can handle them. With
digital simulations of human neurons, the computer is trained to
“think.” It can recognize changes and patterns and adjust to the
ever-changing feedback from the sensors.

“The neural networks are capable of learning,” Hamrita said.
“They can juggle the different variables in the bird, the
weather, economic factors — all of the things that go into
making the best climate-control decisions.”

Full-scale Study
Near

So far, Hamrita’s studies have involved only about 30
chickens and a dozen sensor-implanted chickens in her research
chamber. The system is about five years from commercial use.

“The next move is to borrow a producer’s house for a
full-scale study,” she said. “We’re almost ready to do that.”

A full house of around 65,000 chickens would need about 100
sensors. “The sensors would be the biggest investment — $5,000
to $10,000 for 100,” she said. “The system itself would be about
$2,000.”

The sensors would be reusable. And the growers themselves
would be able to implant them.

Chickens Genetically
Different

Hamrita said the futuristic system would pay off for growers
because it has become so important to keep chickens
comfortable.

“The chickens we have now are genetically different from
the ‘yard birds’ of the past,” she said. “Those birds could fend
for themselves, but they weren’t very meaty.”

Over the years, chickens have been bred to grow more
efficiently. Compared to a half-century ago, they now gain 50
percent more weight on half the feed in half the time.

“We’ve altered them for growth, but they’re no longer
hardy,” Hamrita said. “We demand a lot more of them, so we have
to give them more.”