Cameras and sensors bringing digital-farm transformation to hog barns
Commercial pigs are bred for consistency and housed in large barns, which makes production efficient but brings challenges for identification and precision management. In a sea of hogs, which one is which?
“You might think that if we can identify a person in a crowd, surely we can identify a pig. Well, we’ve been trying,” said Juan Steibel, a professor of animal science and the Lush Chair for Animal Breeding and Genetics at Iowa State University.
Steibel is part of a group of Iowa State researchers studying how digitally enabled barns powered by sensors, cameras and data science can transform livestock monitoring, unlocking new opportunities for precision management, welfare assessment and genetic improvement– especially in swine. The ultimate goal is continuous long-term tracking of individual pigs by computer vision, the same sort of advanced image and video analysis that unlocks a cell phone with its owner’s glance, keeps autonomous vehicles safely on the road and enhances medical scanning.
