Modelling of a poultry shed

Abstract

Tegel Foods is New Zealand’s leading producer and supplier of poultry products, providing an extensive range of quality poultry products to New Zealanders for over thirty years. Tegel is a fully-integrated poultry producer involved in breeding, hatching, feeding, growing, processing and marketing of chicken and turkey in New Zealand. The problem presented by Tegel was specifically to model the energy exchange between the chickens and their shed environment in order to better understand and control the shed climate and thereby maximize growth rate.

A model for the heat production and water respiration rate of a typical chicken was developed, based on physical principles. A thermodynamical model of the whole chicken+shed system included the temperature of the external air, the internal air, the chickens, the litter, the concrete floor and the underlying soil. It also included the relative humidity (RH) of the external and internal air and the water flows into and out of the shed.

Modelling of the shed environment’s inputs and outputs will be particularly valuable for continuing assessment of three fundamental inputs of economic importance: feed nutrient density in terms of energy formulation, heating in terms of gas/power usage, and heat removal via extraction fans. Optimisation of liveweight gain and feed conversion potential are the end targets.