PROJECT NAME:
Farm Monitoring and Management System
PROJECT MANAGER:
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Onur SEVLİ
PROJECT TOPIC:
Agricultural production is of great importance in terms of sustainable living and economic dynamics. Within agricultural production, livestock farming and within the livestock sector, milk production holds significant importance. In our country, and especially in the Burdur province where we are located, dairy cattle breeding has great economic importance and potential. The foundation of healthy and high-yield production lies primarily in recognizing and tracking the available resources. Data obtained through a healthy record system will provide information about the past and present of the process and will enable stable future predictions and policy development.
Data recording systems are of great importance in terms of analysis and traceability in agricultural production and livestock farming, as in all fields. Accurate interpretations made on data can enable realistic future planning. In this sense, countries aware of the importance of traceability in milk production and especially large-scale professional enterprises produce or procure record systems that meet their needs. Software and integrated record systems developed by countries like Israel, Germany and the Netherlands have a significant share in the world market.
The recording process and systems applied in the rapidly growing and increasingly important field of livestock and dairy cattle farming are extremely limited compared to the size of the sector. As in different regions of the world, there is no healthy, holistic, and widely accessible record system in our country yet. In this sense, the share of unregistered animal assets and milk production is considerable, and the data on this subject are approximate estimates. However, healthy data recording is critically important for discovering the potential at hand, planning production, managing the economy, and growing it with accurate planning.
In our country and region, data recording systems are applied at certain levels in medium and large enterprises, and the systems used mostly consist of products from foreign companies. Due to external dependency in applications, software costs equivalent to hardware costs, the absence of universal hardware, the tight integration between software and hardware, and closed systems, the installation of data recording systems constitutes a burden especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, and in most cases, they remain inaccessible. Additionally, the local scale of existing systems, the formation of platform-dependent software reduces applicability and brings additional IT infrastructure installation costs to the enterprise.
Considering the sector's problems and needs, the Farm Monitoring and Management System (ÇİYS) project has been developed with the idea of creating a data recording system accessible to everyone at minimum costs. The project offers a recording, tracking, and reporting system that meets the needs of an enterprise in a wide range, including the registration of animal assets in an enterprise, productivity tracking focused on milk production, tracking from pre-birth with registered pedigree information to birth and the process until the animal leaves the farm through slaughter, medical procedures, periodic procedures, ration and feeding, reproduction and condition recording, stock tracking.
PROJECT PURPOSE:
The main focus of the project is to create an innovative and computer-aided operating model that will enable all stakeholders in the large-scale livestock sector, which is an urgent and priority need of our country in the field of livestock, to operate in cooperation and coordination, increase efficiency and quality in enterprises, contribute to our country's self-sufficiency in livestock, and help form elite herds. Currently, while small and medium-sized enterprises cannot keep records of animal assets healthily, large enterprises keep these records in foreign-origin software systems, but the information that can be used for evaluation and decision support cannot be interpreted healthily, and there is no solid infrastructure to evaluate this information expertly. In this context, it is aimed to develop and implement a model that addresses the sector from the widest possible perspective, integrating academic knowledge with technology and field experience/expectations, from feed consumption to milk production efficiency, animal welfare to environmental hygiene, the dissemination of evaluation tools that have entered the literature (breeding selection, linear scoring, body condition scoring, etc.), remote monitoring of farms to the establishment of a central decision-making and strategy development structure.
The main objectives of the project:
• To establish a model that provides effective management and operation, enabling the integration of small/medium/large enterprises (producers), small/large breeding/grower/producer associations, Agricultural Credit Cooperatives/Provincial Agriculture Directorates, and ultimately the university, to achieve outputs that can set an example for our country and the world,
• To contribute to the improvement of the capacities, human resource competence, and technological infrastructure of regional farms,
• To implement the model and infrastructure in pilot enterprises,
• To create an approach that can be applied nationwide, aiming to monitor high efficiency on a national scale, contributing to making livestock self-sufficient and sustainable in our country.
In line with the general objective described above, the following goals are expected to be achieved:
• To enable regional farms to access an IT infrastructure that will contribute to their operation and standardization in accordance with the best practice practices in the field,
• To identify high-performance animals based on productivity records in the system, contributing to the formation of elite herds in our country and thus to self-sufficiency in the medium term,
• To create an operating model where all stakeholders in the sector (enterprise owners, farm workers, producer and breeder associations, agricultural credit cooperatives, university, food, agriculture, and livestock ministry units) can act together for common goals in coordination and cooperation,
• To increase the professional competencies of field workers in regional farms, thereby improving the capacities of enterprises in the region,
• To provide scientific and technical consultancy services to regional farms, transferring the academic knowledge accumulated within our university to regional farms, in other words, to the sector, and reflecting it in real-life applications,
• To implement real-time warning mechanisms that can intervene instantly in the problems and performance issues of regional farms,
• To create an inventory of animal farms at the regional level, determining the current situation related to large-scale livestock in the region based on evidence and data, and setting this as a reference comparison point. Based on this reference point, determining goals and quality indicators compatible with regional and national development plans. Ensuring continuous monitoring of compliance with goals and indicators,
• To increase the awareness and knowledge of regional stakeholders on the subject through information activities to be carried out during the project,
• To expand the proposed model to the entire region after pilot farms, thus achieving a leading and pioneering position in the development of the large-scale livestock sector in our region,
• To create scientific publications with the data obtained during the project, increasing the prestige of our country and university academics in international academic platforms,
• To present the proposed computer-aided operating model as a service model that can set an example for the whole of Turkey to decision-makers,
• To contribute to the development of livestock-related sectors.
PROJECT REGIONAL CONTRIBUTION:
The contributions to the sector at the regional and national level during and after the project and the potential gains of sector stakeholders can be summarized in the main points below.
• During the process of implementing the proposed model in the project, access to the technological tools needed for the modernization of small/medium and large-scale enterprises in the region will be provided. Thus, these enterprises will be enabled to operate more efficiently and profitably.
• During the project, sector stakeholders will be brought together, and problems arising from communication and coordination issues between different stakeholders in the sector will be resolved, and cooperation between these stakeholders will be strengthened. A regional livestock ecosystem will be established in interactive interaction at the regional level.
• With the infrastructure to be created and the services to be provided, the knowledge accumulated at the university will be actively transferred to the unions, cooperatives, and enterprises related to the subject, and this knowledge will be used for the development of enterprises, ensuring its permanence. The coordination and information sharing of producer associations, which are among the project stakeholders, with their members, field veterinarians, and enterprises will also be increased.
• With the feedback to be given to sector workers working on the farm, the capacities of enterprises will be strengthened, and quality improvement will be achieved in the products and services offered by these enterprises.
• By transforming regional farms into farms supported by the university, equipped with the latest technology software systems, and compatible with best practice practices, animal welfare, animal health, and consequently the food safety, quality, and economic value of the final product will be increased.
• With the warning and decision support tools that will be included in the regional information network to be developed within the scope of the project, instant warnings will be produced for practices that are not compatible with international standards and/or may cause a decrease in efficiency, and alternative measures for the solution of these issues will be quickly activated.
• With the analysis of the data to be collected in the regional information network to be created using data mining techniques;
- The performance of farms can be compared with other farms of the same type and size, thus farm owners can receive appropriate feedback and implement corrective preventive actions.
- The analysis of quality indicator sets showing the quality of livestock practices at the farm, farm type, and regional level can be made, and based on these data, the bottlenecks of the region and the sector can be identified and appropriate strategies can be developed.
- It will be possible to monitor time-dependent changes at the regional level, and from here, forward projections and predictions can be created. Based on these inferences and analyses, it will be possible to plan training, strategy, and policy development for the sector at the regional level.
• With the analysis of the data to be collected from the region, identifying high-efficiency animals, and then analyzing their potential for breeding use with verification studies, contributing to the development of domestic breeding animals. Thus, in the medium and long term, it will contribute to making the national livestock system self-sufficient and even reaching the point of exporting breeding animals.
• Since the proposed computer-aided operating model will be a validated and proven successful model, it will be possible to implement this model in different regions and then at the national level. Thus, all the gains listed above will not only provide dramatic improvements in the national livestock system but also enable our country to achieve the leading position it deserves in this field.
• With the products and knowledge to be created, serious information and software infrastructures that can be used nationwide and even internationally will be created, and with the marketing of these at the national and international level, our country can even reach a position where it can export knowledge and products in this field.
• By gradually reducing the imports made, while meeting the country's own animal needs, it will also contribute to reducing the risks brought by imports (spread of diseases, the emergence of new animal diseases in our country, public health risks, etc.).
• Thanks to the integration to be established with enterprises in the region, it will be possible to be known as a strong center at the international level and to become a candidate center where clinical trials/researches of drugs used in animal diseases are conducted.
PROJECT SOCIAL CONTRIBUTION:
One of the biggest problems of the livestock sector is healthy data recording. The number of enterprises that regularly keep their data recorded is limited, and the number of animals in the country and the level of production based on livestock are expressed in estimated figures, and accurate measurements cannot be made. Data recording systems are needed for healthy data recording, and the installation of these systems brings serious costs to the enterprise. Additionally, local recording systems are not sufficiently available in the market, and foreign-based systems are used.
All these problems emphasize the need for a healthy data recording, monitoring, and management system that is local and national, with minimum cost. The developed ÇİYS project offers a recording, tracking, and reporting system that meets the needs of an enterprise in a wide range, including the registration of animal assets in an enterprise, productivity tracking focused on milk production, tracking from pre-birth with registered pedigree information to birth and the process until the animal leaves the farm through slaughter, medical procedures, periodic procedures, ration and feeding, reproduction and condition recording, stock tracking. The ÇİYS project offers a recording, monitoring, and management system with maximum features at minimum cost to enterprises of all sizes, including small enterprises.
ÇİYS is an ecosystem that provides a flexible and scalable infrastructure with interfaces that connect farm management, laboratory, weighing, and milking systems. Being a web-based system reduces the information technology and storage costs for enterprises to zero; allows data to be stored and processed in a scalable cloud infrastructure; provides performance service to many users simultaneously; ensures that updates and improvements are reflected to all users instantly from a single point. The ÇİYS project integrates the field with the expertise of Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, offering the analysis and comparisons of data on the system at local, regional, and general scales as added value to the livestock field by combining the university's academic knowledge and the sector's field experiences.
The ÇİYS project forms a framework with application programming interfaces that offer integration capability with farm equipment to be developed later. It can integrate with existing recording systems, providing a suitable infrastructure for the gradual transition of farms to the ÇİYS system.
ÇİYS is a completely local and national ecosystem that provides healthy data recording, monitoring, and management, which is one of the biggest needs of the region and the country in the field of livestock. It is a promising project with export potential, offering the opportunity to create healthy projections for the future by analyzing regional and national data based on healthy data, ensuring maximum efficiency at minimum cost, and reducing the country's external dependency.