A pair of Texas entrepreneurs and childhood best friends want to take down Big Poultry – and maybe help save the world a little in the process. Watch out, Colonel Sanders. Take care, Mr. Perdue and Tyson. There’s a new chicken king in town.
Smart ideas
This is the first in a series of articles exploring smart technology that exists to make your life easier. Read them all here.
“We probably put over 10,000 hours into designing this chicken coop, which is hilarious,” AJ Forsythe recently admitted. He co-founded Coop with Jordan Barnes, who is also Coop CMO – Chicken Marketing Officer. The pair want to use technology to transform one of the strangest things American families do: raise chickens.
Today, between 10 and 15 million Americans raise backyard poultry for eggs, about 4% of the roughly 330 million of us. The goal is to get this percentage to 20%, says Forsythe, and the path runs right through your locally grown salad.
We talk a lot internally about ‘chicken-curious’ people
AJ Forsythe, co-founder of Coop
“We talk a lot internally about ‘chicken curious’, people who want to raise chickens but don’t know where to start,” Forsythe told TechRadar. They often start by growing lettuce or tomatoes, Barnes adds. That vegetable patch in your backyard, the carrots and parsley and all? That’s like the gateway drug for chickens.
Certainly, changing the industrial food chain is a big, hairy, and audacious goal. Eggs are big business, and farming isn’t for everyone. But everyone has probably seen a video or heard a story about it the horrors of chicken farming on an industrial scale; this is a space ripe for change. And Barnes is clearly up for the challenge.
“Tyson Chicken has already blocked me on Linkedin because I’m trolling them so hard,” she told me.
The technology: how smart is Coop?
The company’s first product is Coop, a charming home for 4 to 6 chickens with shockingly advanced chicken technology. Two battery-powered cameras (solar on the way) in the Coop monitor the birds and eggs and protect against predators, thanks to machine learning. That includes AI-based predator detection using “a curated, chicken-specific dataset with more than 7 million images,” daily routine automations, sound recognition, and more.
The security cameras in my home can’t tell the difference between deliveries and deer; Coop can identify individual chickens and record their behavior. Astonishing. And that’s partly due to audio detection, Barnes notes, a feature Coop calls Cluck Talk.
“There are seven decibels of clucking noises that chickens emit,” she explains, ranging from hungry and scared to happy, predatory and “broody.” Coop’s CTO created “a convolutional neural network tuned to audio” that converts that chatter into real-time language.
No really.
It’s not just about hawk warnings, but about detecting nuances in their vocalizations to understand hunger, moods and overall well-being, she explains.
Even the company’s URL is cool: smart.coop.farm.
“I’ve always wanted to make a cross between smart home IoT and backyard farming. If we can use technology that seems effortless on the front end, how can we enable people who don’t raise chickens to do so?”
It all started in LA’s Chinatown, where Forsythe, as a Cal Poly student, came across a flock of chickens for sale at a market. He rescued four of them, brought them back to his dorm room in a cardboard box via Amtrak, and a lifelong fascination began.
“I built my first chicken coop from a dresser I found on Craigslist,” Forsythe said. Flash forward a decade and a half: his latest company has gone into full-scale production and has eyes (and beaks?) on the future.
“We’ve put 15 years of chicken ownership into this, which sounds absolutely insane, but if you’re going to change a market, which we humbly believe we can, you have to think about everything,” Barnes said.
So watch out, Big Poultry. Your future plans may have been thrown into disarray.