By Sarah Stoutner, Director of Production & Flow in the Central Prairie Region, The Maschhoffs
With so much technology out there today, determining what products to use can be paralyzing – especially when your plate is already overflowing with things to do. At The Maschhoffs, we have been exploring technologies to help us make more informed decisions. Though we are still in the early stages of this process, several lessons have been learned.
Our immediate focus is replacing paperwork and clipboards in wean-to-market barns by capturing daily temperatures, water consumption, inventory changes, mortality and treatments on tablets in the farms.
A few of our successes have come from:
- A real-time understanding of compliance of protocols in barns
Not only are we able to see compliance of paperwork that is required for the Common Swine Industry Audits but also around other protocols such as the timing of vaccinations or treatments.
- - Quicker response times to problems
Before implementing this, mortality data for sites was reviewed weekly by our team for the previous week. Now we can see it daily, which allows us to respond to situations in a timelier fashion. We have shortened the lag from up to 10 days to just one day. We have established thresholds for alerts that come as text messages when the threshold is exceeded, and this helps us focus on the most important issues that growers and caretakers are facing. When our team meets with the caretaker, we can have deeper conversations about what is happening because we already have the basic information at hand – such as temperature for the previous few days, what has been treated, how many pigs are dying, and what has been euthanized.
- Improved visualization of trends
Having graphs in the application has improved the ability to understand trends that are taking place and has helped to increase the response time as well.
- Logistics efficiency
When it comes time to ship pigs out either to market or for thin downs, this helps us get a real-time number of how many pigs are in the barn. We have also found value in better prediction of the number of medications and vaccines that are ordered by having the real-time count as well as water consumption.
Not Without Challenges
There have been struggles as well. Rural Iowa pig barns don’t have great internet or cellular options. For the most part, we have solutions in place. But there are still days when it is just slow, and it takes longer than we want it to.
With any implementation of a new procedure or tool, there are some employees that are quick to adapt while others are more cautious. Working through these struggles has been important and a priority.
Having real-time data certainly doesn’t eliminate the need for people to be in the barns. However, it does help determine the highest priority for the team to address, it allows us to be more efficient and it enables us to provide additional support to caretakers in a timely manner.
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