In today’s poultry industry, automation and precision are becoming essential to ensure efficiency, flock quality and sustainable poultry production. For decades, hatcheries relied on manual gender sorting, a process requiring experienced workers and offering limited scalability.
With the arrival of Genesys, developed with Ceva’s hatchery expertise, a new generation of automated gender sorting solutions is reshaping how broiler operations work.
Genesys provides hatcheries with a modern system designed to support producers facing increasing production needs, labor shortages and higher expectations for accuracy and animal welfare.
PLF offers powerful tools to enhance farm operations, but needs skilled practitioners to interpret the data and translate insights into meaningful decisions.
The livestock sector is under unprecedented pressure to deliver higher productivity while improving animal welfare, reducing environmental impact, and meeting consumer expectations for transparency and sustainability. “Traditional” herd management methods often rely on periodic checks and subjective assessments, which may overlook early signs of illness or stress. Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) addresses this challenge by combining real-time data collection, continuous monitoring, and automated analysis to support more informed and timely decisions. For practitioners, PLF enables a shift from treatment to prevention. By detecting subtle changes in behavior, feeding, rumination, or temperature, these systems help identify decreases in production efficiency, disease or discomfort long before visible symptoms appear. Beyond animal health, the integration of digital data into herd-health planning improves feed efficiency, reproduction, and environmental performance, making farms more efficient, resilient and sustainable.
However, PLF is not a magic solution that will transform every farm into a super efficient one. PLF provides tools that can (should, when possible) be incorporated and adapted to each situation. But skilled and trained practitioners (farmers, nutritionists, agronomists, vets, etc) are essential to interpret the outputs.
Precision livestock farming tools range from wearable sensors to AI-powered cameras, each serving to monitor different aspects of animal health and farm productivity.
PLF currently provides a wide amount of digital technologies designed to observe, record, and interpret almost every aspect of animal life. From sensors worn by individual animals, to milking robots, AI-powered cameras and integrated farm dashboards, these tools transform raw data into practical insights that support daily management and decision-making on the farm. Here are some examples that are already available for application:
All these inputs converge in decision-support dashboards, where machine-learning models allow the translation of raw data into alerts and visual summaries. For practitioners and farm managers, these platforms turn fragmented information into an actionable one — highlighting which animals need attention and when. Yet, as with any diagnostic tool, the practitioner’s interpretation remains essential to turn digital indicators into meaningful, welfare-oriented decisions.
For PLF tools to be effective, the priority should not be having the latest hardware available on the market, but integrating them into existing daily workflows with a clear purpose and ensuring that data drives practical actions.
The most effective approach is to begin with a clear objective (e.g. monitoring rumination, heat stress, or lameness) and start small, using one or two validated tools before scaling up. Data from sensors and dashboards should be incorporated into existing herd-health protocols, linking digital alerts to on-farm actions: management changes, nutritional or reproductive checks, inspection, treatment, etc.
Livestock advisors play a central coordinating role. They ensure that PLF data are interpreted correctly, that alerts are meaningful, and that results feed back into productivity and welfare plans. Regular farm meetings can align sensor outputs with practical outcomes — for example, linking reduced rumination alerts to nutrition audits. Over time, practitioners can build local “digital baselines” for each herd, enabling early deviation detection and performance benchmarking. In essence, PLF becomes most powerful when translated into informed, timely, human decisions guided by professional expertise.
Despite its rapid progress, Precision Livestock Farming still faces some practical challenges. The initial cost of sensors, software subscriptions, and connectivity infrastructure can be high, while the diversity of brands and platforms often leads to poor interoperability — making data integration across systems difficult. These barriers are gradually being overcome thanks to falling hardware costs, improved communication between software, and public or private initiatives supporting digital adoption in agriculture.
The growing amount of information produced by PLF also highlights the need for proper training. Rather than being a limitation, this creates new opportunities for veterinarians, advisors, and farmers to develop valuable digital skills that strengthen their professional expertise.
Data validation and reliability remain key: algorithms trained under specific housing or breed conditions may perform inconsistently elsewhere. Practitioners should therefore rely on tools that have been independently tested and calibrated for their production system.
Finally, as data collection of animal and farm expands, ethical and governance considerations become important, including who owns the data, how securely it is stored, and how it may be shared or monetized. Addressing these issues transparently will help maintain trust and ensure that digitalization continues to enhance animal welfare and farm resilience.
There is now a wide range of ready available PLF tools (from activity collars and ear tags to cameras and automatic feeders) and their real power appears when they become part of everyday routines on the farm, guiding feeding plans, health checks and welfare decisions.
Advances in artificial intelligence, sensor and cloud analytics are expected to enable continuous, herd-level insights that were once unimaginable. These tools enhance professionals’ expertise, freeing time for smarter, more sustainable, and welfare-focused farming.
The implementation of automated gender sorting supports:
Genesys coordinates seamlessly with existing hatchery processes and supports producers in meeting international market expectations.
At the recent Gender Sorting Symposium in Rome, industry leaders, veterinarians, hatchery managers and production experts gathered to discuss the future of broiler production. The event highlighted how modern gender sorting impacts not only hatchery operations but the entire poultry value chain.
Participants brought insights from many fields:
This multidimensional perspective reinforced how critical early accurate broiler male and female sorting is for the entire production chain.
The symposium presented the latest industry developments, including:
The discussions highlighted that what happens at the hatchery level has long-term influence on health, performance and processing outcomes.
Genesys stood out as a reference technology thanks to:
As hatcheries aim to modernize their systems, Genesys provides a practical and future-oriented solution.
The Rome symposium confirmed that the future of broiler production depends on smarter automation, better early-life decisions and sustainable solutions.
Genesys, supported by Ceva’s expertise, is already helping hatcheries meet these challenges and prepare for tomorrow.