Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** small and medium sized poultry…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** small and medium sized poultry and meat processors provide many advantages to society at large, enabling a diversity of choice in meat and poultry products, local employment often in rural communities, a more efficient and reliable food supply chain, and a low carbon footprint farm-to-table food chain within a local community. However, small and medium sized poultry and meat processors do not have the advantages of scale that allow their larger competitors to maintain large teams for quality and compliance as well as install complicated and expensive information technology (IT) equipment to support their workflows. This hinders their ability to compete with their larger competitors in quality, time to market, profitability, and adherence to regulations. In this project, we plan to address the above challengeswith new edge computing and automation technology that allows a meat processor, with little to no IT investment, to leverage an automated system for monitoring and analysis of their production flows and processes - to meet their business needs. The goal of this technology is that IT must be affordable, secure, reliable, and user-friendly and allow the meat processor to collect, store, maintain, process, and conveniently access operational data from their facilities, in order to meet their business needs. Their business needs range from addressing the requirements of their customers, with respect to quality, price and safety, as well as the requirements of USDA/fsis and state regulatory bodies in following the hazard analysis critical control point (haccp) principles in their operating procedures. The data includes metrics from their facilities and storage such as temperature over time, daily logs of their workflow, visuals from surveillance cameras, status of their processing equipment, and others.today, this data is primarily collected manually by small/medium processors, and the data is scattered across logbooks and clipboards making IT hard to see connectionsbetween different data collected in clipboards or in notebooks perhaps on different days, as well as more casual observations of equipment condition that may not be logged at all. For instance, metrics such as temperature in their facilities and status of their equipment are monitored by personnel physically in the processing facilities. This often delays corrective actions until a problem is obvious and leads to waste and delays. The management of USDA and state food safety regulations, while essential, can become a significant part of the workday in small processors. We propose to apply CIRRUS360's network edge computing platform and radio network automation platform gabriel™ to the above problem via deployment of a low-cost edge network, automation in the cloud, and a consolidated graphical interface or dashboard. The solution includes wireless coverage throughout the facility for internet-of-things (IOT) sensors such as temperature and humidity, cameras connected to machin, e learning based processing to monitor operations, and dashboard driven visualization of complex processes. All of the disparate threads of information will be brought together into a complete picture of the status and health of the meat processing workflow, on a simple dashboard for the meat processor to use. We have designed an execution plan based on discussions with our small/medium poultry and meat processor collaborator partner based locally in texas. Based on their feedback, we will prioritize:affordability and ease of deployment of the edge platform via automation, notifications for deviations from target range of metrics such as temperature, data collection and logging of the workflow, anddashboard based visualization of the data in a way that IT is immediately actionable. Our development plan has severalwork items with the following flow: system design and discovery of target use cases with partner, design of dashboard with partner feedback, end to end edge platform software development and US sourced off the shelf hardware integration, and validation in the field with partner. Once the system is deployed via automation, meat processors will be able tocustomize views of their processes as well as receiving early notifications of potential quality or compliance issues, freeing up more time for these small businesses to focus on customers, new product development and profitability.at the end of 18 months, we will have a template for a commercial edge solution for a small/medium poultry and meat processor that will be field tested and ready to scale commercially.