How barn automation reduces labor costs and improves animal performance in poultry farming
Poultry farms are under increasing pressure to work more efficiently. As farms continue to grow and processes become more complex, experienced employees are becoming harder to find. This makes it more challenging to keep daily barn processes predictable and under control, while expectations for animal performance remain high.
Climate, ventilation, feed intake, and water intake must be managed consistently, regardless of staffing levels or farm size. When these processes rely largely on manual control, vulnerability increases. Barn automation offers a structural solution. By digitalizing recurring and time-critical processes, farms gain greater control over daily operations. This reduces workload, limits labor costs, and ensures stable and reliable animal performance.
In this blog, you will learn:
How automation reduces dependency on employees
Why stable barn processes lead to better technical results
The role of automation in growth and scalability
Automation improves animal performance
Stable conditions are a key prerequisite for good animal performance. Temperature, ventilation, feed intake, and water intake play a major role in growth, health, and the consistent development of the flock. When these factors fluctuate, animals respond with stress. Barn automation maintains uniform conditions throughout the entire production cycle by adjusting automatically and continuously, including outside regular working hours.
In practice, this results in:
More consistent development of the animals
Improved feed utilization
Fewer performance dips caused by environmental fluctuations
Working more efficiently through monitoring and stable processes
Manual checks and corrective actions take up a significant amount of time. Barn automation replaces these snapshots with 24/7 monitoring, allowing systems to proactively adjust within predefined limits. Deviations are detected immediately and corrected early, before they affect the animals. This not only reduces daily walk-throughs and ad hoc corrective work, but also creates a calmer barn environment and a more predictable workday.
Performance reliability with changing staffing levels
When staffing levels fluctuate or come under pressure, manual routines become more vulnerable. Automation acts as a safeguard. Processes continue to operate correctly according to predefined standards, regardless of which employees are present. This prevents labor shortages from directly impacting barn results and gives farm owners the confidence that core processes remain under control.
More efficient use of workforce
With barn automation, the role of employees changes. Instead of manually checking and reacting, the focus shifts toward supervision and evaluation. One person can oversee multiple barns and assess conditions based on real-time data. This makes it possible to:
Manage the same number of barns with fewer people
Bring new or less experienced employees up to speed more quickly
Reduce dependency on individual expertise
For larger operations with multiple locations, this can lead to significant savings in staff deployment without compromising quality. For smaller farms, the key benefit lies in the added assurance that processes remain stable even when the farm owner is not physically present in the barn.
Scalability without additional staffing pressure
For growing operations, barn automation enables controlled expansion. Adding barns no longer automatically leads to a proportional increase in staffing pressure, as monitoring and control are centralized and structured. For larger operations and integrations, this also creates opportunities to compare performance across locations and standardize processes, ensuring a consistent approach throughout the business.
Conclusion
Barn automation reduces labor costs by minimizing manual tasks and enabling more efficient use of employees. At the same time, it directly improves animal performance by bringing stability and consistency to the barn environment. For poultry farms facing growth and increasing performance demands, automation is the key to maintaining control over daily operations.
