HMH Farms has pioneered a Jamaican-built digital platform designed to help poultry farmers use data to improve productivity, control costs, and strengthen the financial management of their operations.

Developed in response to challenges encountered by HMH Farms while scaling its own commercial poultry operation, the platform named OVIFLOCK brings production, flock performance, feed, mortality, inventory, sales, and financial information together on one platform.

The system supports multiple poultry houses and flocks and is being developed for layer, pullet, and broiler operations with the aim of replacing fragmented record-keeping with a more structured approach to farm management.

The digital platform is now being tested and refined at HMH Farms, where it was introduced earlier this year. The farm serves as a live operating environment, allowing the technology to be developed around the practical demands of commercial poultry production.

“OVIFLOCK is not simply intended to digitise farm records. The longer-term objective is to help move poultry operations from reactive management and fragmented record-keeping towards structured, data-driven farm management,” HMH Farms founder and CEO H’jort Henry said as he shared details about the innovation with the Jamaica Observer recently.

“We did not build OVIFLOCK because we wanted to become a software company. We built it because, as farmers, we needed better information to run the farm. Once we began solving those problems for ourselves, we realised other farmers may be facing many of the same challenges,” he added.

Citing feed management as a key area of focus in the software’s development, Henry said this was particularly important as it represents one of the largest costs in commercial poultry production.

The OVIFLOCK platform currently tracks feed received, inventory, and consumption by flock or poultry house, allowing management to compare feed usage with production as it identifies unusual variances. The platform also links mortality and cull information to individual flocks, helping managers to identify changes that may require intervention.

Henry said the ultimate objective is to give farmers greater visibility into the relationship between production and profitability, rather than simply tracking output.

To support this, the company also added a “Farm CFO” component to connect farm operations with various financial management processes, including invoicing, receivables and payables, expenses, inventory valuation, balance sheets, and cash-flow reporting.

“The objective is to have a system where the farm’s operational data and financial data no longer live in completely separate worlds,” Henry said.

While OVIFLOCK remains in active development, Henry said HMH Farms plans to expand testing through a controlled pilot programme involving other local poultry farms. However, the longer-term ambition is to take the platform beyond Jamaica to serve poultry producers across the Caribbean, where Henry believes there is significant scope for technologies that can help agricultural businesses become more efficient and financially informed.

This, he said, is particularly relevant as countries seek to strengthen food security and reduce their vulnerability to imported food and agricultural inputs.

“The broader vision is to develop a technology platform originating in Jamaica that can help poultry farmers locally, and eventually across the Caribbean, become more data-driven, efficient, and financially informed,” Henry noted while indicating that stronger farm records could also improve access to financing and other forms of business support.

“A farmer with credible operating records may ultimately be better positioned when approaching banks, investors, insurers, suppliers, or strategic partners,” he said.

Built for varied farm conditions, OVIFLOCK also incorporates offline capabilities, allowing authorised farm workers to capture information when Internet connectivity is unavailable and synchronise the data once a connection is restored. This feature is said to be particularly important for agricultural technology designed for Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, where farm operations cannot always depend on uninterrupted Internet service.

The cloud-based platform also designed for mobile use, allows information to be captured from poultry houses, feed rooms, warehouses, and other areas of the farm rather than being restricted to office computers.

Underscoring the usefulness of the system, Henry said that beyond increasing food production, farmers across the Caribbean will be better equipped to build more efficient and financially sustainable enterprises.

“The farmer should not have to become a data scientist to understand his farm. The technology should do the hard work and give the farmer information he can actually use. If as a region we are serious about food security, we have to invest not only in producing more food, but in building stronger, better-managed, and more technologically capable agricultural businesses,” he said.