Mechanical Chicken HarvesterTeam Members: Hunter Lambert, Thomas Graser, Niko Kangas, Haley Selsor,

Ashcon Bakhtiari, Brett Davis Faculty Advisor: Dr. Ramana Pidaparti

Sponsor/Client: Dr. Brian Fairchild, UGA Poultry Science

Project statement: to design a system/machine for catching and loading broiler chickens for transport. The main method currently for harvesting chickens is to use a crew of about 10 people to walk through the chicken house and catch all the chickens by hand. This requires a lot of difficult, manual, and repetitive labor, which causes catching companies to address problems in cost of labor, injury, and the shortage of laborers. Also, the mechanical harvesters that do exist are usually very large and are either very expensive, have issues with injuring the chickens, or have reliability/cleaning problems. Our goal is to design a system that will successfully catch chickens while remaining cost-effective and reducing the risk of injury to the chickens.

Our first testing procedure would have been conducted after the harvester was initially assembled. We would first test the general functionality of our device by placing sandbags on the conveyor and ensuring that they are properly carried up the conveyor and into the coop at an appropriate speed while being accurately counted. Next, we would use balloons that are weighted to about 8-10 pounds that would serve as a “safety dummy.” After multiple runs with these safety dummies, we would analyze the results and determine whether there were any damages that were done to the balloons which would indicate the chicken being injured. Then after fixing any safety hazards, our testing would have moved forward by applying our machine to a chicken house that contained live broiler chickens. In order to mimic the idea of having multiple machines running at once, we would confine the chickens to a certain area in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the harvester running at multiple instances.

TestingBackground

Design Process

Our SolutionOur group’s solution to harvesting chickens is to take proven concepts from existing mechanical harvesters, like a conveyor that picks up and moves the chickens and places them in a package that is optimized for a single operator. We believe that this is an improvement to the current models for several reasons. This setup will require far less up-front investment for a company to use so companies may be more willing to switch to our design. Also, since the machine is simple and operated by one person it will require less training and skill to operate than a large and complex harvester. Our design utilizes a tray-type loading coop that is commonly used in Europe and newer processing houses in the US since they are compatible with controlled atmosphere stunning, which is a far more humane system. Originally our machine was to be operated with an electric motor to demonstrate the process, but alternatively would be manufactured with a diesel engine to increase efficiency. To operate at utmost efficiency, we would foresee that several of our devices can be used in a single chicken house so that catching speed can be competitive with hand catching and that maintenance/repairs can be performed on one unit without shutting down the entire catching operation.

Small-Scale Model

We began our design process by visiting a chicken farm and seeing how chickens are caught by hand. At the farm we also met the catching foreman with many years of hands-on and practical experience. After researching existing harvesters and academic articles, we brainstormed ideas on the best method to catch chickens by hand. Next, we ranked the important qualities that a harvester would need by creating a design matrix to decide which brainstormed concept we would develop into our final design. We then made representative sketches and a simple CAD model showing our basic conceptual design. We made a small-scale model of our design to better understand how our design would work and some nuances of a conveyor. Finally, we began to do a detailed design and designate parts and constructed the base of our final concept. We had to change our final deliverables due to the COVID-19 pandemic to a detailed 3D model and simulation, part designations, and testing procedure instead of a physical prototype. We now have fully realized our design using Autodesk Inventor modeling and simulation.

Catching Decision Matrix

Final DesignConveyor Assembly

Design Evaluation and ImpactTo evaluate our prototype from the testing process we would time how fast we could collect and load chickens and compare that to the speed of hand catching and the Apollo harvester. Since our design is meant to be used in a crew of around five, we would multiply the catching rate of one harvester by five to properly compare our system to market standards. Also, a good product must be easy to maintain and clean, so we would evaluate how long it would take to clean the device after catching chickens. We were originally budgeting around $1500 to construct our prototype, but we anticipate that a full production model with features not included in our proof of concept model, like an engine that drives the wheels, more complex sensors, etc. in addition to retail markups would cost on the order of $10,000 per unit. We project that a full set of 5-7 for a full crew would cost around $50,000-70,000 which is significantly less than the Apollo harvester which costs around $250,000 per harvester, so a company might be more willing to invest in our product. The adaptation of having multiple smaller chicken harvesters being operated simultaneously will allow for less effort from laborers without chicken catching companies having to change their crew format. The simplicity of our harvester will also allow for the laborers to understand operations without a long period of training. We hope that our design will be able to mechanize one of the last remaining processes that require manual labor in a chicken farming operation and make reduce the physical demand on the workers which would lead to better working conditions and higher worker retention.