University uses AI to chicken farm, producing 60,000 extra chicks

In a unique initiative led by post-2000s students at south China’s Shenzhen University, AI technology has been employed to enhance chicken farming, resulting in a significant increase in production. More than 10,000 faculty and students at the university now enjoy free chicken soup because of the technology.

A group of students visited the Guizhou Chishui black-bone chicken breeding base in 2023. Under the guidance of teachers from the School of Computer and Software at Shenzhen University and enterprise engineers, they tackled challenges in hardware installation, labeling and recognition of black-bone chickens, and training of multimodal algorithms.

After 8 months of development, they successfully created the black-bone chicken smart farming system using AI technology and cloud platforms.

In 2022, students from the same class had developed an AI goose farming app for Shantou's distinctive lionhead geese in just over 100 days. By implementing technologies like goose body recognition, they identified sick geese, leading to a 30% increase in overall survival rates.

Building on their experience in AI goose farming, the project team implemented a foreign object alert to prevent invaders like wild dogs and foxes from stealing chickens. Temperature and rainfall sensors were used to monitor the chicken coops.

After more than 8 months of research and continuous development, the team successfully identified and tracked 250,000 black-bone chickens, utilizing 100,000 images of chicken bodies to create the first Black-Bone Chicken Smart Farming System. The system has been operational for over six months, resulting in a 30% increase in the slaughter rate of Black-Bone Chickens at the breeding base, producing over 60,000 additional birds.

Source: China Youth Net; trans-editing by Wang Yunya