Mapping industrial poultry operations at scale with deep learning and aerial imagery
This addresses the lack of comprehensive location data for CAFOs, which pose risks to air, water, and public health, by providing a scalable solution for environmental regulators.
The researchers tackled the problem of locating Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) for environmental monitoring by using deep learning on aerial imagery, resulting in the creation of the first national, open-source dataset of poultry CAFOs from over 42 TB of imagery.
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) pose serious risks to air, water, and public health, but have proven to be challenging to regulate. The U.S. Government Accountability Office notes that a basic challenge is the lack of comprehensive location information on CAFOs. We use the USDA's National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) 1m/pixel aerial imagery to detect poultry CAFOs across the continental United States. We train convolutional neural network (CNN) models to identify individual poultry barns and apply the best performing model to over 42 TB of imagery to create the first national, open-source dataset of poultry CAFOs. We validate the model predictions against held-out validation set on poultry CAFO facility locations from 10 hand-labeled counties in California and demonstrate that this approach has significant potential to fill gaps in environmental monitoring.