Design and implementation of production supervising system for large scale rabbit farm

Abstract: Farm raised rabbit has high yield, low cost, and economic efficiency, etc. However, along with the improvement of production scale, there exit issues of environmental degradation, breeding disorder of baby rabbit, inbreeding depression, low efficiency of management. Currently, livestock breeding production supervision system has been researched widely, but the rabbit as the research object for such system is rare. For rabbit fast pace of breeding habit, environment is easy to be deteriorated, and focusing on the automatic monitoring of the environment and genetic relationship analysis for large scale rabbit farm production supervision is rarely reported. Based on the characteristics and existing problems of rabbit breeding habits, and use of wireless sensor network, Internet technology such as network communication, in this study, we designed a large scale rabbit farm production supervision system. The system realized rabbit farm production management, business management, business analysis and the basic management functions at the same time. These components in the system were the keys for applying the remote environment monitoring and genetic relationship analysis function. Aiming at the problem that the large-scale rabbit breeding is easy to be influenced by environment, such as air temperature, humidity and ammonia, and for the design and development of the low power consumption rabbit's environmental monitoring node, we placed 2~3 sensor nodes in each rabbit house. The use of multiple sensors to collect rabbit inner environmental data of air temperature and humidity, ammonia concentration and other environmental data was constructed by ad-hoc network between the nodes in the form of large-scale rabbit farm environmental monitoring wireless sensor network (WSN). As such, the realization of the rabbit breeding environment parameters can be on-line monitored based on remote transmission and monitoring results via a Web interface for data visualization display, query and trend of early warning indicators. When the monitoring data were more than threshold that led from favorable to bad environment, the system automatically alerted and reminded the breeding personnel to make preparations for the prevention, thus reducing the mortality of the rabbit. Rabbits multiply rapidly, and are vulnerable to inbreeding depression. When large-scale breeding reached to a certain number, recording the relationships between individual rabbits manually becomes impossible. The system model based on the coefficient of inbreeding and rabbit relative formula, and through the computer software system of the rabbit genetic information in storage in combination with calculation and analysis, the rabbit inbreeding coefficient and genetic relationship of the automatic calculation and analysis has been realized. The results showed that the maximum risk reduction of young rabbit quality affected by inbreeding depression was improved resulting in high survival rate and the yield of seed rabbit. The system has been applied to Guangdong's largest meat rabbit breeding enterprise for a year in three rabbit sheds with nearly total 900 rabbits in management. In comparison with the rabbit shed without the system installation, rabbit pups survival rate in the shed with the system increased by 5.15%, rabbit mortality dropped 3.33%. All reached the significant level (P<0.05). Through the application of the system, the enterprise work efficiency was improved, rabbit disease and mortality rates decreased significantly, the improvement of rabbit breeding, the survival rate and profit level in the enterprise had greatly improved.