Being a veterinarian sounds like a straightforward role: Diagnose and treat animals. Our responsibilities, however, also include ongoing self-education and evaluation of herd health even when they’re not sick.
Much of my time is spent studying chronic health issues and other farm challenges to recommend solutions. I evaluate pigs at specific operations in order to make recommendations about maintaining health, preventing disease and helping the producer figure out how to change their inputs or environment to make the pigs more productive.
This is where data comes into play. Carefully collected and recorded data can assist a decision-maker — whether it’s the producer, their vet, nutritionist or a farm worker — in doing their job more efficiently. In addition to raising pigs, the swine industry is diligent about collecting data from operations and systems about everything from sow performance to marketing, weaning to nutrition, farrowing to grow-finish.
More data, more potential solutions
We know how important it is for producers to learn how to organize and read their silos of data or have someone who can assist with that. But producers and their on-farm employees aren’t the only ones who can benefit from the numbers, as data can invaluably aid veterinarians.
If you are a producer who works with CVS, your service may include a vet doing on-farm visits every four weeks to assess your swine population for health and productivity. On my visits, I want to see their living conditions and know their feeding and vaccination schedules and their rations, your biosecurity protocols and more. I’m only going to be on-site for a few hours, and I only have 13 of these opportunities a year to observe anything that may be helpful for pig health and production.
I will be able to provide some recommendations to help your operation. But if you want to really get the most from my time, providing access to particular data you’re collecting enhances my service. If I have access to pre-visit data for requested parts of your operation, I have a much better chance of spotting challenges and being able to look for opportunities to address those once I’m on-farm.
For instance, with access to your data platform, I may notice that there is an opportunity in your gilt heat detection process. When I am next at your farm, I can coordinate time to observe the daily heat detection instead of missing it while walking some other part of the farm. Without advance data, if the last place we end up is in the middle of that process and I only then realize the clue could be in how it’s being done, I won’t be back for four more weeks — and an opportunity for you to begin making effective changes is delayed a month.
You see blue, I see teal
Besides giving them time to objectively evaluate your farm’s data and formulate hypotheses and recommendations ahead of a site visit, another good reason to bring your vet into the loop is to let them be able to question how you are assessing and recording data in the first place, where applicable.
Mortality data is a good example for this. Data itself is objective — you weigh out five pounds of feed for each sow and record that; you administer vaccinations and record the animals and date; you dispose of dead pigs and note the animal (if tagged), date and cause of death. You or a farm worker may be able to readily observe some causes of death, such as prolapse or if a pig had been diagnosed with a specific illness, but you also probably have a number of “Unknowns” in your database.
These deaths concern you, but where you might not see a pattern and think it’s just the price of doing business, your vet might formulate specific questions based on the numbers, that you would not. In other words, I may interpret the same data differently than you do in some cases, or see a more nuanced “teal” where you see “blue.”
A vet might question why there are so many “Unknown” causes of death, and if there’s a way to lessen that uncertainty, such as training you or employees on necropsy or taking specific sample collections for postmortem analysis based on clinical signs of the carcass. Compared to 20 years ago, many farm workers now have the background and education to learn some basic necropsy techniques, which would better break down your data.
More daily value in data use
Producers, integrators and veterinarians have been collecting mountains of data for years from systems, processes and even written records, on everything from sow parity to litter size and feed cost to closeout. “What questions are we trying to answer?” is still a familiar rallying cry even as we slowly figure out how to sort and analyze so many numbers.
But there are immediate ways that information can help on the farm, provided you have the technology to record and access it in real time — I’m talking about employees being able to communicate more effectively, especially in a large operation, from hour to hour. Having a phone or tablet with access to an adequate download/upload data speed means you can video chat with your vet or nutritionist and transmit data from where the pigs are when you need those answers. It also comes in handy for something as simple as making the most of your employee’s time so that when he finishes one long task, he doesn’t have to find you in person to be assigned the next immediate task.
The two things still preventing this kind of data connectivity on many farms are hardware limitations and lack of broadband infrastructure. The good news is both are improving; more rural areas are being wired. And while biosecurity protocols still prohibit people carrying their personal phones into the barn to limit pathogens, keeping dedicated tablets in each area is a more realistic goal thanks to lower prices — if a tablet is dropped in a manure pit, it can be replaced for maybe $50 instead of costing hundreds.
Talk with your veterinarian about the possibility of sharing your operation’s data access with them, or even preparing specific reports to share for regular review if that is a more comfortable arrangement. A reputable vet will respect your data privacy and not share with outside parties, and this process may be the step you need to take the health and productivity of pigs to the next level!
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