Held at Charles Sturt University, Agrihack brought together farmers, software and web developers, agribusiness professionals and academics. Participants formed teams and were given just 48 hours to find innovative solutions to three challenges.
AgriFutures Australia was a proud sponsor of this year’s Agrihack and our Chicken Meat Program developed one of the three challenges which participants worked to solve. The challenge: to create a way to accurately measure the live weight in meat chickens.
AgriFutures™ Chicken Meat Advisory Panel Member Guy Hebblewhite said it has been a longstanding challenge to measure the live weight in meat chickens prior to processing and farm pick-up. He said there are systems in place but they are very manual and not perfect.
“The growers currently monitor the weight of the bird generally by hand using a weigh scales similar to what you may see at the supermarket. There are electronic in-shed auto weigh systems are available, but the uptake is low by the processors. Ultimately, these systems can be improved to generate more accurate data and to reduce the manual nature of the current process.
