Video Recording System to Assess Animal Welfare Impact of Environmental Changes in Barns

Dan Hofstetter, John Boney

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Animal welfare may be enhanced if research tools are developed to continuously monitor animal behavior on farm. Turkeys are curious, and their behavior changes when humans are present, making it difficult to assess behavioral changes from environmental adjustments such as lighting or ventilation. Additionally, many poultry producers have off-farm jobs. A video monitoring system may be used to aid in poultry management from remote locations. This paper describes a highly flexible custom solution to monitor birds using internet-connected cameras and a Windows 10 virtual machine running Agent DVR recording software with OneDrive for cloud storage of video footage. The video recording system was used to record activity of turkeys living in sixteen different pens continuously for six weeks for an animal welfare study assessing differences in behavior for birds raised with night lights compared to birds raised in complete darkness at night. Discussion will include lessons learned from setup and operation of the recording hardware, software, and cloud storage platform, as well as observations from footage recorded during the animal welfare study.

Original languageEnglish (US)
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 ASABE Annual International Meeting - Houston, United States
Duration: Jul 17 2022Jul 20 2022

Conference

Conference2022 ASABE Annual International Meeting
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHouston
Period7/17/227/20/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Agronomy and Crop Science
  • Bioengineering

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