South African agritech start-up Omniolytics is set to use tech giant IBM’s suite of solutions to help improve food security for African poultry farmers.
Omniolytics founder Michael Samson announced it will use IBM Cloud and IBM Watson to build a digital farming platform that helps emerging and commercial farmers unlock new insights through artificial intelligence (AI), cloud and the internet of things (IOT).
In addition, the digital farming platform will collect data on the environmental conditions of production facilities and day-to-day management activities and processes of poultry, to improve animal health, mitigate losses and assist producers to improve production efficiency.
“Local farmers have to be enabled to be globally competitive and the best way to do that is through technology. IBM Cloud and AI ensure we have a platform to help farmers across South Africa use precision agriculture to enhance the efficiency of their production,” said Samson.
Accurate future predictions
“We’re introducing solutions to the market which help improve feed conversion ratios, mortality and growth rates, and benchmarking practices across their production facilities. This will ensure accurate future predictions across the value chain and make poultry farming more sustainable,” he added.
Omniolytics develops smart farming solutions for emerging and commercial poultry farmers. Its flagship solution OmnioFarm is built on IBM Cloud and collects, processes, analyses and visualises insights collected from integrated wireless sensors.
DataViz, which is the start-up’s foundation product, draws data from wireless sensors placed in the chicken broiler house to monitor the environmental conditions, including air and water quality as well as lighting.
These sensors provide data via IOT platforms to the DataViz platform − digitally capturing facilities’ environmental conditions and production records, while also scheduling activities, setting thresholds and notifications. The platform also captures live and historic trends in real-time and can also be accessed over a mobile device or computer.
