''The Connected Hennery''

In The Connected Hennery Workshop you learn how to make a very special hennery! It allows your chicken drive it around your field, clean it and get it ready for planting potatoes or what ever you fell like!

The Connected Hennery is an application of basic artificial intelligence in the field of Internet of Things. It analyses and predicts the movement of your chicken and moves along with them in your field! It is a new product for permaculture in-between industrial and free range chicken production.

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life” Oscar Wilde

The Connected Hennery is artistically inspired also in the work of George Orwell. The author of books such as 1984 and Animal Farm also believed that the arts could strongly influence real life. The Connected Hennery revisits those concepts and represents a transitional technologically enabled model of socioeconomic organization.

The Connected Hennery is a reflection about the use case of the Poultry chain management of IoF2020. Inspired by the motto of that use case to respect animal welfare, the artwork starts by giving the chicken the control of the location of their home. It follows recent tendencies of permaculture, within which mobile henneries are substitutes for tractors in the cleaning of agricultural land. In permaculture, chicken inhabiting a defined piece of land clean it and fertilize it. Farmers, by simply moving the hennery around their land, make it ready for cultivation. The digital system of The Connected Hennery analyses the position and movement of chicken inside the hennery and predicts in which direction they would like to progress next, freeing the farmer from that work task. Furthermore, other sensors implemented in the hennery allow easier monitoring for the farmer in order to simplify and more effectively manage her/his intervention in the maintenance of the hennery.

The Connected Hennery is looking at decentralized models of production of chicken and at its potential as added value for the associated use cases of the LSPs. Food suppliers are looking at how consumers are more and more interested in biological and organic products and how can they adapt to keep their leadership of the supply markets. This leads these suppliers to create their own production experiments in order to better understand how to create new products the fit customers’ demands. It is for this sort of context that works such The Connected Hennery are being developed in order to promote the LSPs towards end users.