Determining valuable variables to design an early warning system for individual fattening pigs, a pilot study

Internet of Food and Farm 2020 (IOF2020) is a large-scale project funded by the European Union aiming at an accelerated adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) within the European farm and food production. The project consists of 19 use cases, organized into five different trials, including Pig Farm Management. One of the aims of this use case is to create early warning systems for possible health and production problems in individual fattening pigs. A pilot study to test the technical performance of several different sensor systems was recently concluded. Data from 119 fattening pigs (60 boars and 59 gilts) were collected. The barn was divided into 8 pens, with 14-15 pigs of the same sex (either gilts or boars) per pen. The pigs were checked for health problems daily by caretakers and twice a week by a trained observer. Each pen was fitted with a flow meter and a HF RFID-antenna near the drinking nipple. A conventional round feeder, mounted with a HF RFID-antenna was used in 4 of the pens. In the other 4 pens, a Nedap feeding station with weighing scale was used. All pigs had 2 high-frequency (HF) RFID tags, one in each ear. An extra low-frequency RFID tag was added to the right ear for the pigs in the feeding station pens. With these systems, data on feeding and drinking patterns, water consumption and, in half of the pens, feed consumption and body weight was collected on an individual pig basis. Several individual cases that died or with other types of health problems, such as lameness and illness, will be analysed to determine whether the health status of the pig was reflected in the data and if so, which variables are most promising to detect specific health problems. These results will be presented at the conference.