By Caleb Shull, director of research and innovation for The Maschhoffs
Technology adoption within the U.S. swine industry continues to advance, admittedly, at a slower pace than some would have predicted a few years ago. While technologies such as electronic reporting systems, sensors, cameras and microphones offer exciting potential, they also carry significant risk to production systems. One simple transformation that technology has enabled is the migration from lagging weekly metrics to daily or real-time data capture. Even that subtle of a change can cause disruption if not managed and supported properly.
Here are three tips to help you better use real-time data in growing pig operations.
1. Find a Reliable Data Capture Platform
The first key to success of migrating from weekly reporting to the daily capture of electronic barn records is the reliability of the data capture platform. Connectivity can be a major constraint, as conventional barns have metal siding and are typically located in areas with poor cell service. Even sending small amounts of data to off-site storage systems can be a challenge at times. For these scenarios, the ability to store data on the device until connectivity is restored becomes critical. It only takes a few times of people not being able to log onto a device or people losing data they entered to create significant frustration. Many metrics, such as daily mortalities, require manual entry into devices, and the loss of trust or backing from caretakers destroys the value of a data capture platform.
2. Promote a Cultural Change Among Employees
The second key to success is promoting a behavioral, and in some cases, cultural, switch in the people using the platform. These platforms produce new data points that production leads might not know how to best utilize. Thus, standard procedures for the use of this information are required to achieve maximum benefit. Viewing and using these records daily to plan schedules and identify the high priority sites to visit becomes critical to creating value from the technology platform. Just knowing about issues doesn’t create value. In some cases (e.g., low temperature in young pigs), immediate reactions to these data feeds are necessary. It is important these new tools are incorporated into team meetings and become part of the culture of how a team operates.
3. Focus on the Right Leading Indicators
A third key to adopting daily or real-time data capture systems is focusing on the right leading indicators. Ultimately, these indicators should be focused on areas where action can be taken to improve performance. An example of looking for the right leading indicators was a project looking at age of a pig, water consumption, environment in the barn, cough detection and injectable treatments administered as leading indicators of mortality. As part of his doctoral program at the University of Missouri, Caleb Grohmann modeled the impact of these parameters on the ability of various models to forecast increases in mortality.
As noted in the chart above, each of these variables included in a tree-based model contributed different amounts to the prediction accuracy of mortality three days in the future in the nursery period (zero to 6 weeks post placement). These results, along with the body of work in that project, provide hope that we can predict mortality events but also suggest that it is likely going to take multiple leading indicators. We must continue to look for leading indicators that can identify actionable problems before they lead to serious issues in our production environment.
There are many reasons to be bullish on continued technology adoption. Developing technology solutions that are cost effective and create tangible value is a challenging but worthwhile endeavor.
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