About this episode

Rachel Stephens interviews JT Perry about ChickenSense, a solution for monitoring backyard chicken health using technology.

In this MonkCast Conversation, RedMonk Research Director Rachel Stephens talks with JT Perry, co-founder of Barn Analytics, about building ChickenSense — a hardware and software product that uses RFID tags and in-coop sensors to monitor backyard chicken health. JT shares how his own farming experiences led him to build a solution for detecting illness in egg-laying chickens before it's too late. They discuss the challenges of designing custom circuit boards for the first time, managing Bluetooth communication in environments without Wi-Fi, navigating tariffs and supply chain uncertainty, and the chicken-and-egg problem (pun very much intended) of building a data analytics platform before you have the data. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/ tech-for-chickens-with-jt-perry / Chapters: 00:00 Introduction and Background 01:32 From Tech Burnout to Farming (With Computers) 02:46 The Hypothesis: Weight Loss as a Health Indicator 05:34 Bluetooth, Battery Life, and Coop Connectivity 09:18 Protecting Hardware from Chicken Grossness 11:22 Manufacturing and Supply Chain Challenges 12:26 The Platform 16:24 Biggest Engineering Challenges 17:54 Target Market and the Cattle-Pets Spectrum…

People in this episode

Host: Rachel Stephens

Guest: JT Perry

Topics covered

• chicken health monitoring
• RFID technology
• agriculture technology
• supply chain challenges
• data analytics

Keywords

• chickens
• health monitoring
• RFID
• Bluetooth
• supply chain
• data analytics
• agriculture

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Barn Analytics

Products: ChickenSense

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