South African agritech start-up Omniolytics will use tech giant IBM’s suite of solutions to help improve food security for African poultry farmers.
This as the local poultry industry encounters challenges, ranging from the quality and origins of feeds, high feed prices, and the recurrence of avian influenza and disease outbreaks such as listeriosis and salmonellosis.
According to a statement, Omniolytics will use IBM Cloud and IBM Watson to build a digital farming platform that helps emerging and commercial farmers unlock new insights through artificial intelligence (AI), cloud and the internet of things (IOT).
Furthermore, the digital farming platform will collect data on the environmental conditions of production facilities and day-to-day management activities and processes of poultry, to improve animal health, mitigate losses and assist producers to improve production efficiency.
“Local farmers have to be enabled to be globally competitive and the best way to do that is through technology,” says Omniolytics founder Michael Samson. “IBM Cloud and AI ensure we have a platform to help farmers across South Africa use precision agriculture to enhance the efficiency of their production.
“We’re introducing solutions to the market which help improve feed conversion ratios, mortality and growth rates, and benchmarking practices across their production facilities. This will ensure accurate future predictions across the value chain and make poultry farming more sustainable.”
Omniolytics develops smart farming solutions for emerging and commercial poultry farmers. Its flagship solution OmnioFarm is built on IBM Cloud and collects, processes, analyses and visualises insights collected from integrated wireless sensors.
The statement notes that DataViz, which is the start-up’s foundation product, draws data from wireless sensors placed in the chicken broiler house to monitor the environmental conditions, including air and water quality as well as lighting.
These sensors provide data via IOT platforms to the DataViz platform − digitally capturing facilities’ environmental conditions and production records, while also scheduling activities, setting thresholds and notifications. The platform also captures live and historic trends in real-time and can also be accessed over a mobile device or computer.
Craig Holmes, technology leader at IBM Southern Africa, states: “Agriculture plays a crucial role in the success of our local economy and through the EEIP [Equity Equivalence Investment Programme], we’ve been able to support Omniolytics at a critical stage of their business growth.
“By improving access to IBM’s Cloud and AI technologies and increasing the adoption of a range of digital solutions as we incubate and support start-ups – we’ve set out to not only support local demand, but also ensure our entrepreneurs become globally competitive. This is crucial in a post-COVID world and we’ll continue to provide innovative technology start-ups with advice, support and the best technologies available in the market.”
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