For many, Christmas is not complete without a leg of Australian smoked ham. But as you prepare to tuck in this holiday season, we’re taking a step back through the value chain to show you the ongoing research to improve the health, welfare and management of pigs.
Our Pig Welfare and Pork Provenance project is using Xsights IoT tags (Xiot® Tags) on individual pigs to monitor and manage animal health in commercial piggeries.
One focus of this project is ensuring that the data captured can be easily used by the people who look after the pigs through the development of a mobile app.
Food Agility sat down with Xsight’s Dr Michael Garrett and Dr Megan Trezona from the Craig Mostyn Group to find out more.
How are the tags are used and what type of information is collected?
Michael Garrett (MG): The Xiot® Tag is a low-cost Bluetooth based ear tag. In the ears of pigs it continuously collects and broadcasts data on that individual pig’s body temperature and proximity to key areas of interest such as feeding and drinking stations.
The aim is for all the pigs on a farm to be continuously evaluated for changes in temperature, activity and movement as a basis for identifying health, welfare, performance and development issues.
Megan Trezona (MT): Critical to maintaining and demonstrating good health and welfare outcomes in commercial piggeries is early detection and management, the project is developing technology that can help us do that.
The project has been carrying out on-farm trials to correlate pig health and welfare indicators with the data collected by the tags to develop machine learning models.
The XLM mobile app assists by alerting staff to pigs that need attention and provides a record of each pigs’ history. Why is this new interface so important?
MG: The idea behind the app is that a stock person can walk into a room as part of daily rounds, there might be 1,000 pigs in that room, and the app will identify pigs on any given day that are most likely to require attention or management or some sort of intervention.
A tag light is enabled through the app as well, and that helps the farm stock person find the pig and then make an assessment based on their expertise as to what to do with that pig.
We want to make it easier for stock people to check each group of pigs in a much more productive and efficient way, with the idea being that they're able to accurately and quickly identify the pigs that do require any attention.
MT: Part of our current activities in the project is to evaluate the app relative to the standard management practices. I think one of the major benefits is that staff will be able to input what treatments or what mortalities they've seen and so we're capturing that data immediately rather than relying either on memory when they go back to the office or on individual pieces of paper or recording forms.
That data can be exported or used in a short time frame to inform across-farm management decisions.
There’s also the support the app provides to staff in following up animals that they've treated previously and in identifying any animals that they may miss because they have to work with large groups of animals on a tight time-frame, the ability to be directed towards animals that are likely to receive or require a bit of attention, I think that really will help work efficiency.
How is this app being tested and evaluated in the farm setting?
MG: Being able to test under real-world conditions, with tags on pigs, with the goal of really trying to align closely with the way it will be used on farm is the key. There’s no way of simulating or representing that and we've iterated many times based on feedback from personnel on the farm using the app.
As the app continues to be refined, what's next for the project team?
MG: We want to continue that real-world testing and validation of the app and evaluating that in terms of those metrics that count on the ground. We're looking for impact, accuracy, and to reduce the time it takes to check a room or pigs and doing that continuously. We’ve got a comprehensive product roadmap for not just the mobile app, but the accompanying web app as well, which is designed for farm managers, animal scientists, researchers or vets, for example, as well as commercial and sales representatives within the business. But in terms of the mobile app, specifically, we're looking at adding additional features for including RFID chip support, more granular and more detailed medical logging.
Further on-farm trials testing the whole system performance are planned for 2025. The Pig Welfare and Pork Provenance project is a partnership between Food Agility, Curtin University, Craig Mostyn Group, Pork Innovation WA, the Western Australian Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Xsights Digital and Beans
