$1.2m pig welfare and pork provenance research project
Good animal welfare practices and provenance are becoming important critieria for consumers who purchase livestock products.
As part of a new $1.2 million research partnership, next-generation IoT tags and machine learning will be deployed to ensure the delivery of high standards of animal health and welfare in commercial piggeries. The research will also investigate the value of sharing the information throughout the supply chain.
The three-year research partnership is between Food Agility CRC; Curtin University; Xsights Digital; Craig Mostyn & Co; Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Western Australia; Pork Innovation WA; and Beanstalk AgTech.
“It’s hoped this research will provide pig producers with a tool to monitor animal health in real time, allowing for earlier intervention to further enhance welfare, productivity and profitability,” said Food Agility AI and Robotics Pillar Lead Ashley Rootsey.
“It will also examine how the technology could be applied throughout the supply chain.
“While this research focuses on the pig industry, the technology could have potential for other animal production industries,” Rootsey added.
The project will use data from Xsights IoT Tags (XIoT), a wafer that can be retrofitted to a standard button ear tag, to report temperature, movement and location of pigs in real time.
The value of this data will be unlocked by correlating it with biological measures from pigs in a commercial setting and machine learning will be used to develop a model to predict health and welfare outcomes of pigs, alerting producers to pig health status in real time.
The project will also create a digital record of pigs’ history to demonstrate animal welfare provenance to customers and consumers.
Dr Rob Wilson, Chair Pork Innovation WA (pictured above), said: “Pork industry research and development is evolving and looking to technology over traditional solutions for enhancing on-farm welfare and consumer confidence is absolutely the way forward. The project represents a strong collaboration between a diverse range of organisations who each bring a unique set of skills. PIWA looks forward to supporting the project partners through access to experienced, on-farm research and project management personnel.”
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