Turkey tallying could get a boost from AI-powered drones
Tracking turkeys is hard work. More to the point, it’s difficult to keep a watchful eye on the agricultural industry’s millions of Thanksgiving birds. Even with declining demand, the United States still raised about 200 million turkeys in 2024 alone. Ensuring and improving their health and welfare has long been a problem for commercial breeders, but Penn State University researchers may have a new high-tech solution. According to a study recently published in the journal Poultry ScienceAI-enhanced drones could soon be an indispensable tool for large-scale turkey counting.
“This work provides proof of concept that drones and AI can potentially become an efficient, low-labor method for monitoring the welfare of turkeys in commercial production,” Enrico Casella, a data scientist and co-author of the study, said in an accompanying statement.
In a recent trial, the team first purchased a commercially available drone equipped with a color video camera. They then deployed air support four times a day to sweep a pen of 160 turkeys aged five to 32 days. After compiling all the footage, the researchers looked at individual video frames and manually categorized the turkeys based on their behavior. Sitting, standing, perching, feeding, flapping their wings: whatever the birds were doing, Casella’s team made sure to note it.
From there, they trained and validated a popular computer vision learning model called YOLO (You Only Look Once) based on images. Their best turkey-trained YOLO iteration correctly spotted all behaviors present 87% of the time and also accurately labeled actions 98% of the time. The results are particularly impressive given that a farm often has cluttered and dynamic fields of view.
“The study shows that an AI system equipped with a drone can accurately detect turkey behaviors,” Casella concluded.
With additional tweaks, the team believes their turkey drones could soon help already overburdened workers while also enabling near-continuous, non-invasive wellness monitoring. Either way, turkey drones are certainly improvements to be thankful for this season.
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