The problem
Pork producers face significant productivity and economic challenges due to pig health and welfare concerns during various stages of growth. This is compounded by difficulties in the early identification of issues which is not always possible for large groups of pigs as current approaches rely on human observation to identify ill-health or injury.
As such, there is a clear need to develop solutions to better understand health and welfare outcomes at the individual animal level, however currently the industry has no viable means for doing this in a way that supports enhanced decision making and early intervention at scale.
Our solution
Xsights is working with a consortium of key stakeholders including the Craig Mostyn Group, the Food Agility CRC, Pork Innovation WA, Beanstalk, the WA Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, and Curtin University to develop a solution which supports real-time pig health monitoring for both groups and individual pigs and empowers pork producers to act proactively in response to risk factors.
This three-year initiative will utilise Xsight’s IoT tags (XIoT) to track the temperature, movement, and location of pigs throughout their growth cycle to provide new insights into animal welfare and a responsive, data-driven foundation for undertaking interventions.
Working closely with a range of domain experts and researchers from stakeholder organisations, we will utilise a rigorous, evidence-based approach to realise a solution for pork producers which enables them to better manage pig health and welfare. Pork processors will also be able to adopt our solution to trace products and provide information on provenance throughout the pig supply chain more accurately.
Considerable potential benefits
Our solution will provide a range of benefits to enhance value throughout the pork production and processing lifecycle:
- Optimise animal health and welfare outcomes and subsequently enhance the profitability of pig production.
- Enable 24/7 animal monitoring and reduce staff manual monitoring dependency.
- Reduce losses in production through early intervention and targeted treatment outcomes.
- Reduce loss of growth rates for sick pigs, reliance on medication and treatment, and the burden of hospital pen management.
- Demonstrate product provenance and more clearly distinguish high quality Western Australian pork produce.
This will provide benefits to a wide range of stakeholders, including pork producers and processors operating throughout Western Australia, agricultural and veterinary (AgVet) service providers, regulators and industry quality assurance program representatives, pork retailers, and consumers.
For further information on this project or to discuss any other projects or initiatives of interest within the IoT, Sensing-as-a-Service, agricultural technologies, asset tracking, and audience measurement spaces, please contact Xsights
You Can Only Manage What You Measure!
