The Canadian and Ontario governments are investing in upgrading the data-entry and tracking systems for egg and chick production in the province
By Jackie Clark
Staff Writer
Farms.com
Recently, the federal and provincial governments provided funding through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership to enhance Ontario’s hatching egg and hatchery industry. The Ontario Broiler Hatching Egg and Chick Commission (OBHECC) will administer the funds to enable farmers to upgrade their operations.
“With cost-share funding of up to $141,450 through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, the Ontario Broiler Hatching Egg and Chick Commission will upgrade its systems that track egg and chick production. This upgrade will reduce costs to the hatchery sector by further automating data inputting processes,” said a Dec. 30 release from the Ontario government.
These updates will also connect other data-monitoring systems.
“For example, it will be possible for individual producers to setup and store their barn management data monitoring the barn environment,” OBHECC said in a Jan. 8 statement to Farms.com.
"OBHECC is committed to partnership that drives innovated processes to meet new challenges and opportunities for our membership and industry," Bill Van Heeswyk, executive director of the OBHECC, said in the Dec. 30 statement. “This progressive solution will reduce overhead and increase the overall efficiency of the hatchery supply chain while building value and serving the chicken industry's needs of sustainable, safe and high-quality products,” he added.
Farmers themselves and the broader industry will benefit from the increased efficiency.
“Today, each hatchery manually enters data into its proprietary system as well as the OBHECC online traceability system. The project solution will modify the current authentication service and data service, and will allow the hatcheries to connect and upload data. (As a result, the system will) automatically reduce data errors and data entry hours, thereby reducing the transfer of costs to the entire industry,” the OBHECC statement explained.
“Furthermore, the lag time to get data into the system will be reduced as hatcheries and farmers will not have to manually enter the data into OBHECC systems,” the statement said.
OBHECC will use this funding to help farmers upgrade to the new data-tracking system.
“The main action of this will be to upgrade the back-end systems and provide each hatchery with a custom-made application which will transfer data according to their individual business practices,” the Jan. 8 statement said.
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