Turkey tallying could get a boost from AI-powered drones

Tracking turkeys is tough work. More specifically, it’s difficult to maintain a watchful eye on the farming industry’s millions of Thanksgiving birds. Even with declining demand, the United States still raised an estimated 200 million turkeys in 2024 alone. Ensuring and improving their health and wellbeing has long been an issue for commercial livestock providers, but researchers at Penn State University may have a new high-tech solution. According to a study recently published in the journal Poultry Science, drones bolstered by artificial intelligence could soon provide a much needed tool for large-scale turkey tallying.

“This work provides proof of concept that drones plus AI can potentially become an effective, low-labor method for monitoring turkey welfare in commercial production,” data scientist and study co-author Enrico Casella said in an accompanying statement.

In a recent trial, the team first purchased a commercially available drone equipped with a color video camera. They then deployed the aerial aid four times per day to sweep a pen of 160 turkeys aged between five and 32-days-old. After compiling all the footage, researchers reviewed individual video image frames and manually classified the turkeys by their behavior. Sitting, standing, perching, feeding, flapping—whatever the birds were doing, Casella’s team made sure to make a note of it.

From there, they trained and validated a popular computer vision learning model called YOLO (You Only Look Once) based on the images. Their best turkey-trained YOLO iteration correctly sighted all present behaviors 87 percent of the time, and also accurately labeled the actions 98 percent of the time. The results are especially impressive given that a farm often features cluttered and dynamic vision fields.

“The study shows that a drone equipped AI system can accurately detect turkey behaviors,” Casella concluded.

With additional tweaking, the team believes that their turkey drones may soon help already overburdened workers while also allowing for near-continual, non-invasive welfare monitoring.Either way, the turkey drones are certainly improvements to be thankful for this season