Applying Precision Agriculture to Artificial Waterfowl Hatching, Using the Black Muscovy Duck as an Example

Abstract

(1) Background: agriculture practices adopt homogenization-farming processes to enhance product characteristics, with lower costs, standardization, mass production, and production efficiency. (2) Problem: conventional agriculture practices eliminate products when these products are slightly different from the expected status in each phase of the lifecycle due to the changing natural environment and climate. However, this elimination of products can be avoided when they receive customized care to the expected developing path via a universal prediction model, for the quantitative description of biomass changing with time and the environment, and the corresponding automatic environmental controls. (3) Methods: in this study, we built a prediction model to quantitatively predict the hatching rate of each egg by observing the biomass development path along the waterfowl-like production lifecycle and the corresponding environment settings. (4) Results: two experiments using black Muscovy duck hatching as a case study were executed. The first experiment involved finding out the key characteristics, out of 25 characteristics, and building a prediction model to quantitatively predict the survivability of the black Muscovy duck egg. The second experiment was adopted to validate the effectiveness of our prediction mode; the hatching rate rose from 47% in the first experiment to 62% in the second experiment without any human interference from experienced farmers. (5) Contributions: this research builds on an AI-based precision agriculture system prototype as the reference for waterfowl research. The results show that our proposed model is capable of decreasing the training costs and enhancing the product qualification rate for individual agricultural products.