"We improved the mortality rate 4.5 times"

By efficiently utilizing the climate control equipment in his farms, Tiago M. Santos was able to improve his mortality rate by up to 4.5 times. This allowed his farms to instantly measure up to Arasco's top-performing farms. Tiago is a veterinarian and has been working in Saudi Arabia now for 5 years. He is managing one of the biggest farms of Arasco, a group of 7 farms with in total 70 houses and a production of 1.7 million birds.

Klant

Arasco - Saudia Arabia

Marktsegment

Broilers

Oplossingen

MTT Ventilation system

Reducing mortality is my main concern

All of his farms are automated: “I have the basic equipment that I consider essential to provide a good result, like inlets, fans, tunnel doors, pad cooling and a climate control computer that brings all those items together to work in harmony to produce the best climate for my birds. My most important performance indicator is, how many birds I can deliver to get slaughtered, so reducing mortality is my main concern. I believe that if you have a low mortality rate the other indicators, such as growth per day, feed conversion and carcass quality, are also fine”.

I strongly believe in automation

To achieve his goals, he asked the help of Fancom’s technical service to set up the F37 climate controllers in his farms: “I strongly believe in automation to standardize the decision-making process. Once you set up the controller, it will always react in the same way. I try to move away as many activities as I can from the hand and the opinion of the operator and put what I can in the controller. If you have a good set up in the controller, you can be sure that you don’t have to worry 99% of the time. And when you have something to worry about, you just improve the set up. That’s what we have been doing last year when we had a visit from Fancom’s technical advisor. He gave us a lot of guidance how to manage our controller properly and how to make better use of the technique we already have.

Ventilation and heating are always in balance

We have started setting up the minimum and maximum ventilation curves. Good minimum ventilation is essential to keep CO2 and moisture levels within limits for healthier birds. With this curve control the ventilation automatically follows the age of the birds. We also activated the evaporative cooling function. Instead of depending on someone’s judgement, we now have an automatic timer function, based on the actual situation in the house. Finally, we activated some extra functions to improve the climate situation in the houses. With Optisec, the system evaluates the situation in the house and decides what is the right moment to active heating. Ventilation and heating are always in balance. The result is less heating activation which saves on heating costs, but more important, improves the environment of the birds. The Humitemp function takes the humidity in the house into account and always calculates the combination of humidity and temperature for the optimal fan position. This is very useful for us because we have cold and humid winters and very hot and dry summers. These options make the system precisely tailored to our situation.

"I am very grateful for
the way Fancom
helped me to
improve our results.”

Tiago M. Santos - Arasco

The importance of minimum ventilation

Good minimum ventilation is essential for a good climate in the house. This makes it an absolute condition for a top performance from your animals and decrease animal mortality!

The best performing houses

We learned a lot from the technical assistance that we have got. We were able to bring the human intervention to a very low level and rely more on a good set up in the climate control system. As a result, we improved the mortality rate 4.5 times and brought this house from one of the poor performing houses to the best performing houses of the company. Another advantage is that it is much easier to train the operators, which saves me a lot of time with new staff.

Efficient management

I know my equipment is reliable and can make the decisions that I had to take every day, so I can focus on the important things that can help me changing the results for the better. I use the management software in which I can track what is happening in the house. Every morning I check the alarms and the graphs to see if something happened during the night. In case something is wrong, I have the data to follow up and to understand what went wrong and to correct it in the next cycle. I also look at the birds to see if their behaviour tells me something. But the data is there to tell me what is happening during the time that I was not in the house. The management software is a feature that every controller should have, because if you don’t measure, there is no way of managing your houses”.

Technical assistance is very valuable

With the correct set up of his controllers and mortality rates under control, Tiago is thinking about further steps to improve the performance of his houses: “we are considering implementing a live bird weighing system to help me improve the uniformity of the birds delivered to the slaughterhouse and to facilitate an efficient slaughter planning. For our next project we ordered the Fantura inlet valves to further improve our minimum ventilation. I am very curious about the results of that. I am an advanced user and I am very interested to know about the technical possibilities of the controllers at my farms. The technical assistance is very valuable for me I am very grateful for the way Fancom helped me to improve our results.

Do you want to use complete farm automation in your business?

Forward thinkers

Forward Thinkers have one foot in the present and one foot in the future. What they do, they do well. And to keep it that way, they look ahead. Can it be done differently, can it be done better than we are doing now?