From Farm to Fork: Transforming Egg Quality and Boosting Export Potential using Artificial Intelligence on Poultry Farming

Abstract

Nothing can spoil fresh eggs that were laid by chickens, like dirty vent feathers, blood strains and minor cracks. Eggs play an important role in the context of human health due to its cheap cost and accessibility across the globe. But egg damage paves the way for a significant size of a shortage of nutritions, and creates demand which leads to an increase in price. The brand name of the company that supplies the eggs loses its reputation when damaged eggs reach the market along with good eggs and this can also lead to business loss. India is considered to be one of the worst farm poultry industries across the world, because of poor maintenance of farm, lack of cleanliness and non-compliance to the safety standards. Just because of this, the Indian market loses its power of negotiation on price and loses the opportunity to export the eggs to foreign countries even though India's egg production is close to the egg production margin of other countries. Not only from the perspective of commerce but also from the view of health this can lead to adverse consequences when the unclean eggs are consumed by the public or people who have less immunity. Every year a significant number of people are suffering from diseases when the eggs, which are poorly handled in the process of quality control, are consumed. This could also lead to a fixation of mindset to the consumer that these are usual eggs in india. The consequence of this mindset could result in more severe effects in consumerism over the period of time. This might also prevent people from purchasing the eggs for consumption. The major reason for this is unhygienic rearing practice and improper quality control measures. These are open invitations for egg contamination although India is the third largest country in the world in the production of eggs. There are more than forty seven million egg producers who do not meet safety standards, most of the produce are rejected for export due to chemicals used during the rearing process. Consumption of these eggs had led to a serious issue in india. A sizable number of people are resistant to antibiotics just because of the consumption of eggs that were produced using chemicals and eggs in which chemicals were intact on the shell of that egg. An article that was published by a renowned newspaper states that consumption of such contaminated eggs, which had heavy metal, has led to poisoning in children, paving the way for mental development problems, sometimes mental retardation. This study has attempted to reduce the severe consequences which are a result of consuming eggs with dirt or damaged eggs. A huge effort has been made to ensure that this scenario changes over the period of time, by incorporating AI in the field of Poultry industry in order to enhance the quality of egg production. The study we conducted clearly shows that most of the poor rearing practice happens due to human error. This can be changed by replacing the human efforts by machine, we could replace the entire quality control process especially removing the spoiled eggs from the the batch that is to be sent to the market. The model that we tried to build has given marvelous results in separating the spoiled from the good eggs. The algorithm will not only identify the spoiled eggs but also stores the final output in the database where the Organisations can access it at any point of time. The AI Object detection model will detect the cracked eggs, the eggs with dirt, the eggs with blood stain and many more. In nutshell our object detection model will detect all abnormal eggs which will help us prevent the abnormal eggs from reaching the consumer.