Pig Welfare and Pork Provenance

‍The Challenge:

Maintaining good pig health and welfare is a key focus for the Australian pork industry, as these factors impact productivity and profitability

Early treatment of sick or injured pigs is crucial but it can be difficult to identify issues in large batches of pigs in commercial production cycles.

There is a growing demand for enhanced animal welfare management by customers, but a limited ability to accurately trace products to the end-user remains a hurdle.‍

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The Solution:

Xsights IoT Tags (XIoT) are a cost-effective wafer that can be retrofitted to a standard button ear tag to report temperature, movement, and location of pigs in real-time.

The research will unlock the value of this data by correlating it with biological measures from pigs in a commercial setting and using machine learning to predict animal health and welfare outcomes.

A model will be developed to initiate triggered alerts related to health status in real-time allowing the early detection and treatment of sick or injured animals.

The application of this data throughout the supply chain will be examined by applying the same tag system to carcasses and meat products to enable the traceability of individual pigs from farm to end user.

The team will also examine if the information can be used to add-value by demonstrating animal welfare provenance to customers and consumers.

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Outcomes:

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• More timely information about individual pig health to inform producers’ management decisions to reduce mortality and improve production, boosting economic productivity.
• Reducing the costs of treatment and hospitalisation of sick and injured pigs through earlier identification of health issues.
• Greater transparency throughout the supply chain to meet consumer and market requirements for animal health, welfare and provenance.

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For more information please contact hello@foodagility.com

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