The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e78: Affordable Farm Sensors | Layers v Broilers

Episode Date: April 2, 2016

This ep: Bob Siegfried of MidAtlantic Farm Sensors on wiring up your farm for better management, plus John McCauley of Chicken People returns to recommend the best bird to start with if you're new to pasturing livestock. Interested in entering the contest mentioned in the episode? Use this link to participate. It's April 1, 2016 at time of writing; the draw will be held in a couple of weeks.

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant Podcast is for people who are passionate about farming, gardening, food politics, food security, and the intersections among these topics. At theruminant.ca, you'll find a summary of each episode, as well as book reviews, essays, and photo-based blog posts to stimulate your thinking about food production. I tweet, at ruminantbant blog and email from editor at the ruminant.ca. All right, time for the show. Hey folks, it's Jordan. So every other week on the ruminant podcast, we feature short segments that focus on the practical aspects of farming. And we're at another one of those episodes. I've got two segments for you this week. The first one is mainly aimed at market gardeners,

although I think there's some stuff in there for most small and middle-sized farmers. It's my interview with Robert Siegfried, who is the owner of a company called Mid-Atlantic Farm Sensors. That's midatlanticfarmsensors.com. And Robert contacted me after I put out a call based on a listener request for kind of mainstream off the shelf versions of what is otherwise very

expensive and specialized farm equipment. That was Seth from I believe Amistad Farm who made that request a while back. And Robert wrote to tell me that he started a company with that idea in mind. He explained that for a long time, there has been farm-specific technology that allows very high-level forms of monitoring for information around the farm using remote sensors and a central dashboard, but that it has been very expensive and so really out of reach to the small to medium scale farmer. Robert's company has adapted technology

used in other industries that is much cheaper and just as effective, according to Robert. So you're gonna hear from him. And with regards to this segment, I just wanna make clear that while Robert clearly contacted me because he has something that he's selling that he wanted you to know about, I am not, this is not a formal sponsorship. I haven't received anything from Robert in exchange for this segment.

And I treated this interview like any other interview with someone who has some information that I thought would be of interest to my listeners. What I can tell you, though, is that Robert does have a substantial discount on his product that he is willing to give away to one listener and there'll be more info about that at the end of the segment. Okay so after that segment we have one that will be of interest to pastured livestock folks. A few weeks back I had a conversation with John McCauley of chickenpeople.com weeks back, I had a conversation with John McCauley of chickenpeople.com. You might recall he was talking about how to keep your birds dry in cold and wet conditions. Well, John's back, and this time we're going to be talking about whether the newbie pastured poultry farmer should

consider getting into broilers or layers as a first stab at pastured poultry. So that's coming up second. I hope you enjoy the episode. And well, here is the bio of Robert Siegfried. I'm Bob Siegfried, owner and operator of Mid-Atlantic Farm Sensors. My background is as an environmental scientist, and we're looking to bring sensors for environmental monitoring to the small and mid-level market farmers. Bob Siegfried, welcome to the Room in a Podcast. Thanks, Jordan. Glad to be here. What is your startup? What's the name of it, and what's it about?

Yeah, my startup is Mid-Atlantic Farm Sensors. What we're looking to do is bring sort of the Internet of Things to our small and mid-scale farmers. Big ag for years has been able to afford large sensor systems, you know, but they were often bulky, very expensive, thousands of dollars. They required solar panels and batteries and technicians to set them up to transmit back, you know, temperature data and soil data. We felt there was a way to bring that same technology now that everything's miniaturizing to small-scale farmers at a much more cost-effective price point.

Right. Okay. So let's try and create some context here. This sounds really interesting. I operate a small-scale veggie farm. So how might I use a system like this on my farm? Like what kinds of things would I be measuring? Yeah.

So there's a couple different things you may be worried about. You've got a greenhouse that you may heat in the spring to get your starts going for your spring production. You might go to bed at night hoping that the heater is still running through the night and not cutting out on you. You might have a walk-in cooler in the summer that you, depending on, take the crop heat out of your produce before you take it to market. So a number of different things like that. Soil temperatures, soil moisture, these systems that we've adapted from other industries, if anything goes wrong, it'll actually email you, text you, or call you on the phone and wake you up and alert

you to that something's going wrong before you've lost your crop or lost the produce that you've harvested and put in your walk-in. Okay, very cool. So, I mean, I'm probably simplifying a little bit, but is it fair to say if it's something that I might be interested in measuring around the farm, a sensor can be used to measure it and then send the data to a centralized, I guess, online dashboard that kind of keeps track and also alerts me when something's not right. Correct. There's three basic components, the sensors, the gateway, which is really the new component that's making it a lot cheaper. The gateway acts like the mothership.

It collects the radio data that's coming out of the wireless sensors, and then it pushes it up to our cloud-based dashboard. And it uses either a cellular signal if you're way out in a rural area or if you're lucky and you've got a wireless router, like in your barn or your farm office, you can connect it to that. And then the dashboards have become really user-friendly, all kinds of adjustments. You put your phone number in there. You can set it to tell you exactly what temperature it is and give you warnings if it's too high or too low in the greenhouse.

And it's very flexible. You can turn it off anytime you want to just from an iPad or iPhone or a basic desktop computer. Right. So, Bob, on one end of the spectrum, you kind of already covered, you've got systems that have existed for a long time for large scale agriculture that are, for most small farmers, probably inaccessible in terms of price. But on the other end of the spectrum, we do have simple monitoring systems like, you know, you can have a wireless thermometer in your hoop house that can send you an alarm when the temperature has dropped too low or gone too high. Well, what is the limitation of that system, which you could probably go and get at a farm supply store or hardware store?

Yeah. So a big kind of technology change that's happened is in the battery consumption and radio transmission distance. So there's a lot of the lower end products have a fairly short, I have a wireless thermometer here, but it can only shoot 100 feet max. Where the systems that we've got, there are different ones out there. where the systems that we've got, there are different ones out there. Some of them are about a 300-foot transmission distance, and then there's a system that has a 1,000-foot transmission distance. So we're talking being able to space sensors out across the farm,

even in fields, remotely located hoop house or something, and still be able to get that data back to the gateway and push it up to the internet. Once it's up there the dashboards like I say are really customizable allowing you to set thresholds and times of day when it won't work it doesn't need to send you messages and it also stores that data for the long term. So it allows you to kind of mitigate different types of risk you might have, overheated greenhouses, things like that. But at the same time, you're able to go back and look historically at your data

and see how maybe the temperatures were performing last year versus this year. And I think over time, as people get experience looking at their data more, they'll actually start seeing patterns that are helping them become better, more productive. Right. I mean, right off the bat, I can think about, I don't know, if I was, if I wanted to, it sounds like I could monitor the soil temperature over, you know, starting starting from February onwards. And if I kept doing that year after year, I could start to get a good sense of how the soil warms up

and start to tailor my plantings and be able to plan based on past patterns and that sort of thing, hey? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, you can pull the data out of the cloud into an Excel spreadsheet. You know, if you're like me and a little bit of a data geek and do a lot of your own little analysis, you could do growing degree days. So you can track sort of pest emergence from year to year and see how that might change. And there's a lot of sensors other than just temperature. There's humidity. What's the humidity in your walk-in?

Are you keeping it high enough? Let's just imagine. I want to even get more specific in terms of on my own farm. So I imagine then that I could, through using your system, I could be monitoring a hoop house, and let's say I don't want it to go higher than 90 fahrenheit at the same time i don't want my walk-in cooler to get higher than say 44 fahrenheit i also don't want the humidity to get above or below a certain range in that cooler and i've

also like to have a sensor in some soil because i want to know i want to i want to know when the temperature is consistently staying above 50 degrees fahrenheit because that's when i want to plant peas and i think of that example because i've actually been out with my own digital thermometer about 20 times in the last in the last week or so measuring the soil temp out where i want to plant peas because i'm waiting for it to stay consistently above 50. I guess that's, so those different applications, those could all be measured and centralized and then I'd be getting the information on my phone or tablet or whatever. Yeah, and the sensor that's in the soil, but could actually, you could set it up to call you or text you, hey, it's 49 degrees.

So that you, instead of going out there and constantly checking it, it tells you when it's almost ready. So you can not have to spend time checking temperatures or checking things. You let the system do that and rely on it to call you when it's time to take an action instead of, you know, worrying about, you know, is the temperature still okay in the greenhouse in the middle of a cold snap or something. So a lot of interesting applications, and they're coming out with more and more sensors. There's leaf wetness, light intensity, lots of interesting sensors, light intensity, lots of interesting sensors.

And they're all getting smaller and cheaper and less battery-hungry. That's been the big innovation. Right, and that's essentially how you've been able to scale this down to small-scale farming because you're using technology that was developed for other industries, like I think you mentioned the it industry right yeah exactly right so bob um let's say that i want to try this out and i'm gonna plan on starting with three different measurements three sensors um i need to invest uh in some hardware that you sell and then i need to also be paying for like I guess I'm you if I have it right like a monthly subscription fee to to operate my online dashboard so say say three measurements

or three sensors what what is it what are we looking at in terms of investment yeah so you've got to have a gateway and that will either be wi-fi or, and then you'd have your three sensors, different depending on the farm, different sensors, size of farm and stuff. So basically it's about $500 to get a gateway and one or two sensors, depending on what you're looking at measuring. Additional sensors are about $100 a piece. And then monthly fees, if you have to use a cellular signal because you don't have Internet on site,

that's usually about $15 a month. And you can get a month-to-month plan, which is perfect for the farmers. If your production period is February to November and you don't want to pay in the winter when you're not farming you use the month-to-month option I know a flower farmer her season is the other way around she runs all through the winter with heated greenhouses and that's when she runs her sensors and she doesn't

need them in the summer so it allows farmers to only pay for when they're actually in production so five six $600 would get you three sensors, the gateway, and then $15 a month plus the dashboard access, depending on different manufacturers, might be an additional $30 to $40 a year. Right. $30 to $40 a year. Right. Pretty reasonable and right in line, I think, with a lot of other sort of online services that farmers often use,

you know, CSA sign-up software. Oh, sure. I mean, yeah, I invested in CSA software last year, and I was spending $150 a month on that for the months that I was active. So, no, that doesn't seem it definitely in terms of the potential for what this this technology can do it doesn't it it seems pretty affordable um so is this is this stuff ready to go are you are you selling right now or are you still prepping no um you know we're we're uh we have some that are out on test farms right now, and we're getting certified locally to sell to a local state agency.

So we're getting certified with the state to sell them a system for their research greenhouses. But, yeah, we're ready to help farmers out, provide these systems. And remember, these things have been in the market for years, have tens of thousands of units already deployed, and that's part of what we wanted to do was get a system that's already been used, been in use, it's reliable, it's backed up by a manufacturer with extensive tech support, and then adapt it to a slightly different use. Bob, I didn't ask you, who's installing this?

Is it easy enough for the farmer to install, or are there additional setup costs? No, that was one of the things we were looking for. We didn't want to have that technician having to come out, because then you start adding labor costs. What we do is we actually get the equipment here. We plug in your cell phone number, your email. We set the thresholds that you told us you wanted, so it's all kind of set up. And then we put it back in the box and we send it to you.

You just take it out of the box and put it where it's supposed to go, plug it in, put the batteries in, and she's up and running. And then you can go into the software and see how we set things up and then play around with any adjustments. But that way it's ready to roll when you get it. So that was one of the key ways of keeping the cost down is not having to have somebody install it. We do do like a telephone interview where we talk about what you need,

and I actually look at your farm on Google Earth so I can measure, you know, how far is it from your house to the barn to the greenhouse, so I can know that which type of system do you need based on radio transmission distances? Well, Bob Siegfried, I'm really glad you came on to tell my listeners about this. It sounds really interesting, and I wish you luck with your new company. Thanks, Jordan. Appreciate it very much. All right, so that's the end of the segment. Great. So that's the end of the segment, except as I said at the beginning, Robert is putting on a draw for a 40% discount for one listener off of kind of a starter setup of one of these

sensor systems. So as I'm told, the package will include the main gateway plus two sensors. This has a retail value of between five and $600 us, depending on how you set it up. And Robert will give to one listener, a 40% discount off of that package. And, uh, he wanted me to emphasize that's just off the package, the, the regular monthly fees that come along with, uh, using the system. Um, there's no discount on that, but if you're interested, uh, I've got a link in the show notes to Robert's site. I believe he has set up just a basic form. You can submit your email, and I think he wants you to tell him why you're interested in the system,

and you'll be entered in the draw. So good luck to those who compete, and on with the show. Well, hello. I'm John McCauley. I run Healthy Hen Farms in Oxford, North Carolina. We primarily produce pastured poultry, really the broilers, and we do about 8,000 birds a year. So a fairly large operation, one of the largest in this area at least. And I also do online pasture poultry webinars. So you can check our farm out at healthyhenfarms.com or if you're interested in learning more in-depth topics about pasture poultry,

you can check us out at chickenpeople.com. John, thanks a lot for coming onto the room and to talk about pastured poultry with us. Thanks, Jordan. I appreciate the invite. So, John, today what I want to ask you about is something for true newbies, okay? So say you get approached by someone who is really charged up about doing pastured poultry for the first time and has read up, assume they've read a lot and they have a decent understanding of what they need to do. But their question for you is, should I start with broilers or layers? What do you think you'd tell them? Well, you know, that's a big one of those it depends, right?

I always recommend broilers if they can jump into broilers, you know, because when you look at layers, layers are certainly easier to get into from an investment standpoint, from a, you know, you don't have to figure out processing or what to do, at least for a couple of years with your spent hens. And so it's really, it's an easier, it's an easier alternative to get into layers and to grow that slowly than it is to get into broilers. Because, you know, broilers is kind of like what Joel Salatin talks about with grain production, right? You're either in or you're out. And when you're in, you're in it with a fairly significant investment if you're going to

look at it like a profitable business. So, you know, when you take layers, for example, you know, I always recommend people, first of all, start small, right, and learn while it's cheap. You know, you're going to, regardless of how much you've learned. And so I always recommend people start small, learn most of your big mistakes while it's cheap. And so, you know, let's say you started with a 500-layer, you know, flock, and you're looking at sex lynx, you know, we use red sex lynx, a very productive bird, and they don't eat a lot. And so, you know, you're looking at roughly, for those 500 birds, at 300 eggs a year.

So 12,000 to 13,000 dozen is what you're going to get out of that flock and let's say you make a dollar a dozen right so so 12 to 13 000 bucks for a year of labor or a year and four months counting the time that they weren't laying that you have to raise them right and then and then you're talking twice a day, at least twice a day labor. So you got to go out and feed them, open the nest boxes, et cetera, and then you got to go collect. And I recommend collecting twice a day, right, if you don't want to spend a ton of labor on cleaning eggs. So $12,500 for a year and four months of labor at twice a day labor is, you know, on a 500 bird plot. That's a fairly

large layer plot, right, to start with. So you're not talking about a ton of potential profit there, you know, for a lot of labor that goes into it. So I typically tell people to start with broilers and then you can add on the layers as additional income once you have the market for the broilers. But the broilers, I mean, for our farm, Jordan, you know, the broilers are what finance everything we do. It's a significant investment up front, but, you know, it's got the quickest return on your investment, You know, it's got the quickest return on your investment, and you're typically making, you know, right, much more profit for the labor that goes into it, at least in our opinion. Well, John, could you? That was really cool, just the very, very rough numbers you used with the layers. Could you try and do that for broilers then? Does it make sense to kind of talk about 500 broilers so that we could compare?

Can you just take us through some rough numbers involving labor and and gross revenues and what you just did absolutely so um well depending on what you're feeding right feed is the feed is by far probably the largest uh cost component i've got uh my cost breakdown for broilers. I've got basically 42 inputs that go into a broiler, my broiler cost. But feed is the largest component of that. And, you know, because we've chosen, so we only feed certified organic, soy-free, non-GMO feed. So that feed costs me, you know, two and a half times what it would cost if I just went to my local feed mill and got just a standard ration for my poultry. So I'm paying a lot more.

And so we're getting right much more for our end product as well. We charge more to account for that additional cost. But, you know, we're doing a lot of things that value add to our broilers that really push up the revenue, right? So it's easier for me to make more money on one bird than it is for me to raise another bird. And so, you know, like every part, we've got a market for almost every part. All of our feet are sold, all of our livers, hearts, et cetera.

So when you're talking pushing, you know, every part and doing cut-ups, so 80% of our business is cut-up, you can really push the per bird. Our per bird revenue, just to give you an idea, is in the neighborhood of $30 to $35 per bird is what we get. And that's our average revenue per bird. And the reason for that is a lot of the reasons that I just told you, right? We've developed a market for every single part. So, you know, you look at feet, for example, a lot of people compost feet because they haven't developed the market for it. Well, that's a third a pound per bird. And our feet go from $3 to $4 a pound.

So you're talking about a dollar a bird just right there in the two feet that most people just throw right in the compost pile. And that's what we used to do, right? So we had to learn and we had to grow that market. But, you know, a lot of people start out trying to shoot for a $5 to $6 per bird profit from their broilers. And, you know, there's some stuff from APA that, you know, kind of breaks that down and, you know, tells you. But that's based on a conventional feed as well. So we typically, you know, we're shooting for really two to three times that on a per bird net profit. And so, you know, it's but again, it takes a lot of time to develop that market. broilers in my operation and in eight weeks I've basically got $15,000 worth of sales and you're looking at $10, just a rough number, a $10 a bird profit. So you're making $5,000 of profit in eight weeks, assuming you've got the market for your birds.

Right, and then I guess you could run, at the very least in most regions, at least three generations, so, you know, over 24 weeks or something like that. Yeah, so what we do, I mean, we have a, when we start our batches, you know, we'll start getting chicks in, and then every three weeks we're getting another batch. And we do very large batches. So, you know, we're talking 600 to 800 bird batches. And it's really, that's all to do with how many we can process in a day comfortably. So with our processing set up on farm, you know, we can do about 130 to 140 birds an hour

and that makes for about a good day where people have been on their feet for about as long as they can take when you add the cleanup time and everything else that goes into a processing date. So you can, we do it every three weeks. And so we start processing, when we start processing at eight weeks, we're actually processing every three weeks as well for the rest of the season. And so you can have these batches really built on top of each other, right? And you could do it weekly. I mean, you could have 100 birds come every week, but, you know, you're processing every week.

So it really depends on, you know, the situation and what you're trying to shoot for. We kind of scale that to our market and how many birds we think we can sell that year and then kind of work it backwards from that on how many processing dates we need to have. Okay, so getting back to the original question then, it just sounds like for the beginner or the newbie, return on investment of time is higher if I really boil it down with broilers compared to layers, correct? It is.

And I'll say one other thing is the competition, right? There's a ton of people that have eggs for sale. I mean, they're everywhere, from the side of the road, people having signs saying eggs for sale to everybody at the farmer's market having, you know, at least a few dozen eggs for sale from their small flocks. And, you know, it's hard to differentiate yourself in the egg market in our experience, right? But if you can get in the broilers and really kind of grow that, there's a lot fewer people doing it. And, you know, there's a lot fewer people doing it consistently and always having chicken. And that's really where we've kind of set ourselves apart. So if you're in a market and, you know, you see, you know, hey, you know, a farmer will have 50 chickens and he

might not have any for two months after he's sold out of those. I mean, that's typically what you see around here. And so we've kind of found a niche where, hey, if you can consistently have that product and people learn to come back to you over and over and over again, they know you always have chicken, it will build your market just due to that. So I think there's a bigger opportunity as well. But I guess the flip side or a reflection of why more people grow eggs, raise eight layers, is just because it does require a little more complexity to raise the broilers,

right? Just because you have to have an affordable system for slaughter and that sort of thing. Yeah. And it's harder, right. It's harder work. I mean, when I give presentations on pasture poultry, I tell people right up front, I said, look, if you're going to do this, you need to be you need to realize and be comfortable with the fact that this is the absolute hardest way you could choose to raise poultry when it comes to labor. It is labor intensive, right? And so if you're not comfortable with doing that work, and a lot of people don't, a lot of people don't want to put in the hard work, then absolutely steer away from this. Because you are choosing to raise chickens about the hardest way you can.

You know, when you look at the number of people that are successfully doing, uh, pasture broilers versus, and this is my market and I feel like it's probably true in a lot of other markets as well. There's just a lot more people that, that have 10 or 12 cows or, uh, uh, they're raising 20 pigs a year, um, or they're raising, you know, 150, 200 layers and always have a bunch of eggs, right? So there's just a lot fewer people that you see that are doing the pasture broilers. And I think that's a result of, you know, hey, a lot of farmers, we all know a lot of farmers have off-farm jobs, right? And there's only so much labor that can go into that farm. And so I think that's a direct result of that is that farmers

have to choose, you know, what matches up with what they can actually put into the farm. And when it comes to poultry, I think it's one of the most labor-intensive things that we can do. Well, John, I, you know, I'm really glad that you're being really frank about, you know, what it takes to be a pastured poultry person. But I don't want to end on a downer. And clearly, there's something to be said for it, because you're doing it. And clearly, you're passionate. And you're, I presume, making a good living from it. So let's end on a high note. I mean, I guess I would assume that, you know, notwithstanding your cautions, if you're someone who loves working out and developing good systems

and is prepared to work hard, that it can be a really rewarding branch of farming. It absolutely can. And I think there's a place, you know, there could be in my market, for example, in the Raleigh-Durham area, I mean, there could be a couple dozen of guys like me, and I still don't think that we would saturate the market. I think, you know, I think we've heard this over and over from different people, but there is certainly the need and the market continues to grow. You look back in 96, 97 when my wife and I first came back from Polyface

and we started a farm here in North Carolina. I mean, man, we had to work so hard at trying to sell this because people weren't looking for pastured. They were barely considering organic back then. So it was a much different market and a much harder place to sell. Today, we don't do any advertising whatsoever, and we continue to grow by several thousand birds a year. And, you know, we continue to grow by several thousand birds a year.

It's just, you know, the market, in my opinion, the market is certainly far from being satisfied, and I think there's a tremendous opportunity there. And I think, you know, if you do it right and you value add, you know, all the things that make other businesses great, you know, there's certainly an opportunity to make a good living doing pasture broilers, and that's why we've chosen, you know, it is our flagship for our farm, and that's what we put all of our focus into. Okay. Well, John McCauley, I really appreciate you coming on the show to talk about this.

Thanks so much. Jordan, I appreciate it, and I wish you guys the best. All right. That's all, the best alright that's all folks and that's all I got man it is crazy busy on the farm right now so I'm out talk to you next week me the screw. But if we bury ourselves in the woods in the country, wear no clothes so we never

have laundry, we'll owe nothing to this world of thieves. Live life like it was meant to be. Aw, don't fret, honey. I've got a plan to make our final escape All we'll need is each other a hundred dollars And maybe a roll of duct tape And we'll run right outside of the city's reaches We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves And live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us A place that is trying to bleed us dry

We could be happy with life in the country With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve. I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong so we'll run right out into the wilds and graces we'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be And live life like it was meant to be.