Optical Distortion Lenses

Optical Distortion lenses are going to completely revolutionize the poultry farming business.  By being able to remove the traumatizing process of debeaking, poultry farmers will be able to find extensive value in the lenses.  Due to the overall social nature of chickens, cannibalism is rampant amongst large farms.  Although debeaking is a viable solution, the lenses by Optical Distortion is a better route to take.  We should focus our efforts locally in California and Oregon, where our testing was successful, and then begin to spread out across the country.  The chicken population is growing and will continue to grow and we want to be at the forefront.  We will target large and medium farms first, having sales people support roughly 80 farms.  This would allow us to have a smaller number of sales people but still able to provide a customer centric experience.  

The Optical Distortion lenses are revolutionary change to the farming community.  One of the major challenges hitting the egg farming industry is the threat of cannibalism.  Chickens are very social birds and their societies have a definite social structure to them.  At about the age range of 8 to 10 weeks, the birds impose a self-regulated ranking system that results in peck orders.  Through fighting and pecking, the chickens are able to establish a sort of hierarchical social organization (Clarke).  This, at times, results in cannibalism between the birds.  The prior method to curb the cannibalism was to debeak the bird.  Debeaking is quite a harsh process and can scar chickens for life due to the trauma that comes along with the process.  Along with the trauma of the process, the chickens have been observed to lay less eggs due to not being able to eat as much as the other chickens.  This is a major issue because now the chickens are providing less income to the farmer.  The ODI lenses, however help curb the cannibalism and debeaking.  In terms of cannibalism, the debeaking process lowered the rate to roughly 9%, however the lenses cut that in half by lowering the mortality rate to 4.5% (Clarke).

Another major appeal to the lenses is the decrease in the loss of eggs produced by the chickens.  The debeaking process was so traumatic for the chickens that it would cause at least a week of reduction in egg production.  This would hurt the bottom line for the farmers as the reduction of eggs leads to a reduction of income.  

A third appealing characteristic to the lenses is the savings that would be passed onto the farmers through the less use of feed.   Since the lenses affect the depth perception of the chickens, farmers are able to use only one inch of feed in the troughs as opposed to two inches of feed.  Since debeaked birds are only able to eat from a deeper trough, this would cut the waste of the feed.  A farmer with a roughly 20,000 chickens would be able to save 156 pounds of feed per day (Clarke).

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