Stacked cage is the main breeding method of the large-scale farm in China. In broiler farms, dead broiler inspection is a routine task in the breeding process. It refers to the manual inspection of all cages and removal of dead broilers in the broiler house by the breeders every day. However, as the total amount of broilers is huge, the inspection work is not only time-consuming but also laborious. Therefore, a dead broiler inspection system is constructed in this study to replace the manual inspection work. It mainly consists of an autonomous inspection platform and a dead broiler detection model. The automatic inspection platform performs inspections at the speed of 0.2 m/s in the broiler house aisle, and simultaneously collects images of the four-layer broilers. The images are sent to a server and processed by a dead broiler detection model, which was developed based on the YOLOv3 network. A mosaic augment, the Swish function, an spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) module, and complete intersection over union (CIoU) loss are used to improve the YOLOv3 performance. It achieves a 98.6% mean average precision (intersection of union (IoU) = 0.5) and can process images at 0.007 s per frame. The dead broiler detection model is robust to broilers of different ages and can adapt to different lighting conditions. It is deployed on the server with a human–machine interface. By observing the processing results using the human–machine interface, the breeders could directly find the cage position of dead broilers and remove them, which could reduce the workload of breeders and promote the intelligent development of poultry breeding.

This study investigated composted rabbit manure as an organic matrix to replace peat for manufacturing horticultural growing media, where three kinds of rabbit manures were composted with temperatures > 50 °C lasting > 7 days, with a germination index > 70%. The heavy metal contents in rabbit manure were far lower than the thresholds in Chinese standards for safe use as horticultural growing media. Then, different ratios of compost and peat were mixed with perlite and vermiculite to manufacture growing media, which were evaluated in a 28-day seedling experiment with cabbage. The manufactured growing media characteristics could satisfy the seedlings’ requirements; air spaces in particular were improved from 15.7% to up to 28.7% by mixing composted manure. Seedling emergence percentages > 90% and good seedling qualities (including enhanced root length, seedling height, and chlorophyll content) indicated that composted rabbit manure could effectively replace peat to manufacture horticultural growing media. The best seedling performance was obtained with the following ratio of composted manure, peat, perlite, and vermiculite: 3:3:2:2. However, the mixing ratio could be further optimized, and other methods to reduce the salinity may be required for the different requirements of specific crops in further research.