A Strategy for Efficient Pig Production

The Linear Progression of a Lifecycle

The greatest threat to our noble industry is not the vagaries of supply and demand, we have been grappling this uncertainty for generations. It is not disease because science has a consistent success rate in resolving the threat to survival. It is not the balance of elite genetic potential to commercial genetic actuality because it remains a promising work in progress. It is the future projections for an accelerating decline in the agricultural workforce as reported by the World Economic Forum.

This decline, will demand the transition of operational husbandry from a historical, generational succession of conventional, instinctive skills to that of the technologically informed interpretive skills required of a millennial and post-millennial workforce, emerging from increasingly fragile education systems. The millennial workforce’s expectation of supportive technologies delivered through the current cellphone, tablet, and next stage innovations, is non-negotiable. We are deluded if we expect each new generation to by-pass their crescive awareness of environmental degradation, educational, and economic inequality, and the significance of consequentially impaired mental health, on the quality of opportunity. The precision of operational husbandry must shape the understanding of the industrial characteristics of large-scale efficiencies, not the reverse that we have disingenuously tolerated for too long. We must galvanize industry into a clear consensus and coalesce proactive programmes to make adequate the pathways to relevant education and career opportunity for each novice entering the art and craft of pig production . We need to engage the younger generation with humility and recognize that we cannot rely on the foundation of our past working lives, to inform our responsibility to prepare a future for them.

Medium and long-term strategic thinking needs much more than clever ideas, history is littered with the carrion of these. Strategic innovation demands follow through. It needs people whose knowledge is disseminated with vision and rendered with conviction.

Over the last 8? years I have developed Gilt Watch Together? unearthing the woeful sow retention rate of global pig production, and the unacceptable embodiment of economic waste, flawed ethics, and environmental overload. A failure of operational individual pig husbandry. For example, the process control of disciplined herd structure presents, as a tenet of strategic herd husbandry, the challenge of achieving greater sow retention throughout the first five production cycles of the sow’s life. This combines two contradicting concepts, linear and cyclical. The linear progression of the sow’s production life, and the lifecycle encompassing the ?individual production cycles of the sow. The education of operational (breeding herd) husbandry will be based on the linear physiology of the sow achieving five or six production cycles. This natural focus informs operational pig husbandry to achieve and sustain strategic herd husbandry.

The study of the developmental, linear physiology of the elite parent generation sow in the singularity of herd genetics, husbandry, ambient environment, production system, and health management then extends the demand of follow-through. My belief is that the physiology of the sow is significantly nuanced from one completed production to the next. This has a direct impact on the potential, economic efficiency of progeny from each specific production cycle. This will impact how we adapt production systems as we move forward to assimilate knowledge transfer.

Today, technology both for indoor and outdoor production (solar panels?) provides the capability to individually feed the sow through a system that identifies the 24-hour feeding pattern of the animal throughout the production cycle. For example, a sow may stimulate the first drop of the daily allocation, at five-thirty am, and the last drop of the day at ten-fifteen pm. A feed system will allocate equal portions of the scheduled daily amount on request from the sow through this period. This creates data which when consolidated and curated gives an analysis that creates an average feed curve per parity. Adjustment for seasonal variation can also be determined. To support the potential of this ‘automated’ operational husbandry, genetic knowledge transfer is needed to ensure the correct development of the linear physiology of the sow through each successive production cycle. Thermal imaging technology can be positioned in the barn to respond to the electronically identified animal that misses a ration drop to confirm the overall indicators of a threat that is causing inappetence. The systems are programmed to collaborate. This data can further collaborate with individual sow production performance software to enable detailed average lifecycle analysis. The workforce of the future will include the immediate interpretation of individual sow and consolidated herd data as critical skills in the art and craft of pig husbandry.

This is what we engage the younger generation with, to prosecute our responsibility of preparing a future for them. It requires that we build a support team around each herd management business operational team that provides the latest knowledge transfer to ensure the art and craft of husbandry includes operational synthesis with the linear physiology of the sow throughout her lifecycle. Increasing sow retention, and the 3Economic, 3Ethical, and 3Environmental, future world efficiencies.

Don’t miss out on my free offer for March in the previous post entitled Gilt Watch Together? Offer to PigVision Users. PigVision Data Through the Looking Glass.?