Development Of A User-Friendly Automated Poultry Feeding System

The huge cost and high labor demand associated with the current deep litter system of poultry farming poses a great challenge to poultry farming. These drawbacks which currently threatens this system of farming, have been attributed to the over-involvement of humans in almost all aspects of operation of this farming system. The consequences are increased disease outbreak, weakness and poor bird feeding. To ameliorated some of these challenges, an automated poultry feeding system is developed and presented in this paper. The proposed system mimics the roles of real-life poultry attendants in delivery of feed and water to birds at specified interval of time. The system controls the dispensing of poultry feed (liquid and solid) through a program written on ATmega328P microcontroller via the Arduino Uno. The system senses the level of feed and water in the respective trough and intelligently dispense water and feed in response to the sensed levels. The current system is able to effectively sense and predict the level of feed and water in the farm at an accuracy of 98.79% and dispense same within a response time of 50-60ms.