Poultry Flicker
Greengage
Greengage is a global company, founded in 2008. Based at the Roslin Innovation Centre in Edinburgh it is rooted in animal science and welfare experience and comprises agricultural technology experts that produce innovative lighting and animal welfare sensor technology. Their aim is to improve animal welfare, compliance and productivity while reducing operational costs in precision livestock farming.
Greengage systems and products help to solve the increasing challenges in global food production by applying science of light, academic research, and the latest technology to a range of innovative LED lights, sensors and data analytics. They use science to improve livestock production, whilst improving animal welfare.
ALIS
The Greengage Agricultural Lighting Induction System is a novel and patented system that provides a robust system for LED lighting and sensors in livestock environments.
Their inductive power technology allows for bespoke LED lights or sensors to be clipped anywhere onto the bus cable and position accordingly in the livestock shed. Lighting can then be controlled automatically, and the shed environment can be fully monitored for outcome-based measures for animal vocalisations, InfraRed imaging plus temperature, humidity, CO2, Ammonia, and lux levels.
The monitoring system collects the data from the cameras and other in-house sensors to measure welfare aspects such as bird calls and movement analysed via algorithms and environmental aspects within the shed. These are then combined with the productivity data to provide an Animal welfare index score that creates a measure of welfare that can be used to assess, monitor and improve animal welfare and compliance with various on-farm audit requirements. Thus enabling the real time tools needed for farming of the future.
Challenges & Solutions
Lighting Flicker
Flicker in lighting is caused by the vibrations in power supply that then result in differences in light level, especially in modern LED lights. Greengage were approached by a leading professor of animal science to support a study of the effects of flicker in broiler production and the impact of flicker on both productivity and welfare. The challenge was to provide a system for research purposes that would allow variation of average light output, the flicker frequency and the percentage flicker.
Using the existing Greengage inductive lighting system, Invent Design Build quickly identified a modification strategy to allow PWM control of the flicker frequency. Following confirmation of the feasibility of the solution, sufficient samples were built, tested, and shipped in order to support the trials. Trials were commenced on time and research studying the impact of flicker on broiler production is underway. We look forward to reading the results in publications in due course.
“Greengage has been fantastic research partner! They are very interested in providing the best equipment that they can to poultry producers and have focused on partnering with us on lighting research AND practical basis, we love the clip-on light system. We can easily add lights when we want a brighter environment, switch them out to coloured lights for catching, or remove some if we wish to do that. So versatile!”
— Karen Schwean-Larder, Associate Professor (University of Sakatchewan)